Why We Invested in Venomics

The oldest drug discovery lab on Earth, finally searchable.

Prateek Mehta · Nov 4th, 2026

Some of the most important medicines of the last few decades began with venom.

Captopril, the blood pressure drug taken by millions of people, was inspired by the venom of a pit viper. Ziconotide, a treatment for severe chronic pain, comes from the venom of a cone snail. And the GLP-1 story, the one that gave us Ozempic and a whole new way of treating diabetes and obesity, started with the saliva of a Gila monster!

It makes sense, when you think about it. Venom has had hundreds of millions of years to get very good at one thing. Hitting a precise target in the body, fast. That is more or less what a drug is meant to do.

And yet, we've barely looked! Venom is one of nature's biggest and least explored libraries of therapeutic molecules, and until recently, searching it meant one painstaking experiment at a time.

Venomics is changing that.

Kartik Sunagar is an evolutionary biologist and IISc professor who has spent two decades studying venoms and antivenoms, spanning snakes, scorpions, spiders, wasps and more. Vinay Prabhu is a CMU PhD and repeat founder who has spent his career building AI at scale. That is why they are the people to tackle this problem!

We now have protein language models that can finally read and reason about peptides at scale. That lets Venomics have AI do the first pass on a computer, and spend precious lab time only on molecules worth making. A few years ago, this simply couldn't have been built!

Plenty of teams will tell you they are using AI for drug discovery. But a model's prediction is only a hypothesis until it survives the wet lab. What Venomics has is both halves of that loop under one roof.

India is one of the richest biodiversity regions on Earth, and barely a sliver of India's biodiversity has been harnessed. We like to call it a hidden pharmacopoeia!

Their first target is antimicrobial resistance, the rise of infections that no longer respond to antibiotics, which is a planet-scale problem.

Drug discovery is long and meandering. The best team to solve this is being built at Venomics - they are hiring. Write to them!

The hard part is turning the discoveries into drugs. We know it won't be easy. But we believe in this opportunity to unlock discoveries that might change medicine forever!

We are super chuffed to support Kartik, Vinay and the whole Venomics team, and we can't wait to see where they go!