Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw's Immuneel Therapeutics raises Rs 100 crore from Singularity AMC, Rainmatter and others
What's the deal? Immuneel Therapeutics, a Bengaluru-based cancer therapy startup cofounded by BioconDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → founder Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, has raised over Rs 100 crore in fresh funding. Singularity AMCDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Rainmatter by Zerodha, high-net-worth individuals, and existing investors — including Mazumdar-Shaw, Eight Roads Ventures, and F-Prime Capital — participated in the round.
The company will use the capital to expand manufacturing capacity for Qartemi, its CAR-T therapy for blood cancers, and push into Southeast Asia, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East.
CAR-T therapy works by extracting a patient's own immune cells, engineering them in a lab to fight cancer, and reinfusing them. It is considered a breakthrough treatment but remains out of reach for most patients globally due to costs of $400,000–$500,000 in the West — often reaching $600,000–$700,000 per patient.
Why now? Immuneel says it has already partnered with all leading cancer hospitals and institutions in India. The bottleneck is no longer demand but production scale. "What we are now trying to solve for is to scale," chief executive Amit Mookim told the Economic Times.
The company claims it delivers the therapy at roughly 10% of Western costs and aims to bring prices down further as it builds capacity.
What could go wrong? CAR-T therapy is notoriously difficult to manufacture. Each treatment is personalised — made from a specific patient's cells — which limits how quickly production can ramp up. Expanding into new geographies will also mean navigating different regulatory frameworks.
The signal: India is emerging as a hub for making advanced cell and gene therapies affordable at scale. If Immuneel can deliver on its cost and capacity targets, it could open a market that has been largely confined to wealthy patients in the US and Europe. The involvement of mainstream investors like Rainmatter — better known for fintech bets — signals growing crossover interest in biotech startups tackling global health problems with an India-cost advantage.
Read more: economictimes.indiatimes.com
