Startup Deep Dive : Bharat Biotech — the vaccine bet that spiked revenue six-fold then reversed

In FY22, revenue at Bharat Biotech jumped nearly six-fold to ₹8,148 crore ($849 million, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) on the strength of a single vaccine, then fell back below ₹1,500 crore within two fiscal years. The vaccine behind that spike, Covaxin, was cleared for emergency use in India on 3 January 2021 before its Phase 3 trial had produced a single confirmed efficacy number — a sequencing choice the company’s own director later attributed, in part, to political pressure.

Bharat Biotech is a 30-year-old, family-owned vaccine maker from Hyderabad that spent two decades building unglamorous, high-volume public-health products — a Hepatitis B shot, a rotavirus vaccine, a typhoid conjugate vaccine — before the pandemic made it briefly the most talked-about company in Indian science. What happened before, during and after that spike is a case study in how speed, evidence and trust trade off against each other in a regulated, low-margin, high-stakes business.

Quick facts

What they do

Bharat Biotech develops, manufactures and sells vaccines and biotherapeutics, mostly to governments and multilateral health bodies rather than directly to consumers. Its buyers are national immunisation programmes (India’s Universal Immunisation Programme chief among them), UN procurement agencies such as UNICEF and PAHO, and, in smaller volume, private hospitals and travel clinics. The company says it holds registrations in 125 countries and has supplied more than 9 billion vaccine doses cumulatively across its portfolio, a company-stated figure repeated in its own investor and press material. Its product range spans a rotavirus vaccine, a typhoid conjugate vaccine, Hepatitis B and Japanese encephalitis vaccines, a rabies vaccine, a newer oral cholera vaccine, and the COVID-19 products Covaxin (injectable) and iNCOVACC (intranasal) developed during the pandemic.

The origin

Krishna Ella earned a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was research faculty at the Medical University of South Carolina before he and his wife, Suchitra Ella, returned to India in 1996 to start a vaccine company from scratch, funded with roughly $1 million of personal savings. They set up in Hyderabad’s Genome Valley, the first company to do so. The founding insight was that India’s vaccine market was dominated by imported, expensive shots, and that a domestic manufacturer could make the same biology at a fraction of the price if it controlled its own process technology rather than licensing someone else’s. The first proof came in 1998, when Bharat Biotech launched Revac-B, a recombinant Hepatitis B vaccine made without cesium chloride in the purification process — a manufacturing choice that lowered cost and was marketed as one of the more affordable Hepatitis B vaccines available at the time.

The struggle years

The company’s bigger bets took far longer to pay off than its first product, and its highest-profile product would eventually cost it dearly in trust. Three episodes, unsoftened:

• 2001–2018, the rotavirus vaccine: Bharat Biotech partnered with PATH, the Indian government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from 2001 to develop ROTAVAC, built on a rotavirus strain isolated at AIIMS New Delhi in 1985–88. It ran India’s first and largest vaccine efficacy trial, completing it in September 2013, and only reached WHO prequalification in January 2018 — seventeen years after the partnership began, with no guarantee of regulatory success at any point along the way. The payoff was a vaccine priced near $1 a dose against $60–100 for competing imported products.
• March–July 2021, the Brazil collapse: Bharat Biotech signed a deal to supply Covaxin to Brazil, but a March 2021 inspection by Brazil’s health regulator, ANVISA, found good manufacturing practice violations, including that the company had not validated its virus-inactivation method or fully assured sterility and potency. Brazil suspended its plan to import 20 million doses; the contract, routed through a local partner, Precisa Medicamentos, collapsed entirely by July 2021 amid allegations of procurement irregularities, and Bharat Biotech terminated the agreement.
• April 2022, the WHO supply suspension: Following an inspection conducted 14–22 March 2022, the World Health Organization suspended supply of Covaxin through UN procurement agencies on 2 April 2022, citing deficiencies in good manufacturing practices at the plant. WHO said the underlying efficacy and safety data still held up and that “no safety concerns exist,” but exports through UN channels stopped while the company worked through a corrective action plan.

The turning point

The single event that redefined the company was India’s drug regulator granting Covaxin “restricted use in emergency situation, in clinical trial mode” on 3 January 2021 — before any confirmed Phase 3 efficacy data existed. On one side of that decision: a company with a respected but modest public-health vaccine business, and a vaccine whose ultimate efficacy number was still unknown. Industry experts and opposition politicians questioned the approval publicly at the time precisely because the efficacy data was missing. On the other side, over the following eleven months: an interim efficacy readout of 81% in March 2021, revised to 78% in April 2021, a final Phase 3 result of 77.8% efficacy against symptomatic COVID-19 (based on 130 confirmed cases — 24 in the vaccine arm against 106 in the placebo arm) and 93.4% efficacy against severe disease, published in The Lancet in November 2021, and a World Health Organization Emergency Use Listing granted on 3 November 2021. The US FDA, by contrast, denied Covaxin emergency use authorisation outright. The same decision to move first and prove efficacy later both built Bharat Biotech’s revenue base and set up the scrutiny — from Brazil’s regulator, from the WHO, and later from investigative journalism — that followed it.

The money behind it

Bharat Biotech’s capital story does not look like a typical startup’s. It has never taken outside venture equity, and as of 31 July 2025 remained 100% owned, directly or indirectly, by the Ella family. Its “backers” were grant-givers and anchor customers rather than shareholders:

• Founders’ own capital (1996): roughly $1 million in personal savings from Krishna and Suchitra Ella funded the company’s start; this seeded the Hepatitis B vaccine business that generated the company’s early cash flow.
• PATH and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (from 2001): program grants, not equity, funded development of the rotavirus vaccine and supported Bharat Biotech’s later role in the multi-country RTS,S malaria vaccine technology-transfer program, which the Gates Foundation-backed Malaria Vaccine Initiative funded with a reported $168.7 million across its partners. This underwrote R&D the company could not have justified on commercial terms alone.
• Government of India / ICMR (2020 onward): the Indian Council of Medical Research’s National Institute of Virology co-developed Covaxin with Bharat Biotech, and the national vaccination programme became the company’s single largest anchor customer, buying tens of crores of doses at a fixed government price and effectively financing the FY22 revenue spike.

Total raised: no disclosed external equity funding round exists in the public record. In February 2026, Bloomberg reported Bharat Biotech was considering its first-ever equity raise — an IPO targeting more than $500 million — though the company declined to comment and the size and timing remain unconfirmed as of this writing.

How it makes money

The business model is manufacturing scale sold into public-health procurement, supplemented by a smaller private-market layer:

• Money in — government and multilateral tenders: bulk sales to India’s Universal Immunisation Programme and to UN agencies (UNICEF, PAHO) at negotiated, low per-dose prices; during the pandemic, the Indian government purchased Covaxin at a reported ₹157.5 per dose including taxes for a 26.5-crore-dose order, illustrating the thin, volume-dependent pricing typical of this channel.
• Money in — private market: hospitals, travel clinics and private buyers pay materially more per dose; iNCOVACC, for instance, launched in January 2023 at ₹325 per dose for government purchase versus ₹800 in the private market.
• Costs out: biologics manufacturing is capital-intensive — cold-chain logistics, biosafety-level containment, and regulatory compliance across multiple national and WHO inspection regimes all sit ahead of any revenue.
• Where the margin sits: ICRA’s rating commentary and Bharat Biotech’s own reported figures show operating margin swinging from 8.8% in FY24 to 28.2% in FY25 — margin is highly sensitive to product mix and to whether a high-volume, high-margin order (like a large government tender) lands within the fiscal year.
• The part people get wrong: Covaxin did not turn Bharat Biotech into a permanently larger company. Revenue peaked at ₹8,148.1 crore in FY22 and by FY25 had reverted to ₹1,462.9 crore — closer to, though still above, its pre-pandemic scale. The COVID windfall was a temporary spike in an otherwise steady, low-margin public-health vaccine business, not a structural re-rating.

The numbers

Figures below are as reported in ICRA’s rating rationale and in Bloomberg-sourced reporting carried by Outlook Business; unit is ₹ crore unless noted.

A partial data point for the gap year: ICRA’s March 2023 rating note recorded roughly ₹1,490 crore of revenue for the first nine months of FY23 alone, as Covaxin volumes fell sharply and were partly offset by ramped-up supply of the rotavirus, typhoid conjugate and Japanese encephalitis vaccines; no verified full-year FY23 figure was found and none is invented here.

Where the money comes from

Bharat Biotech does not publish an exact revenue split by product or geography, so this section states only what is documented rather than estimating a percentage breakdown:

• Product mix, post-COVID: ICRA’s FY23 commentary names the rotavirus vaccine, Typbar-TCV (typhoid conjugate) and the Japanese encephalitis vaccine as the products that ramped up to offset the collapse in Covaxin supply — the clearest documented evidence of which non-COVID products actually carry the business now.
• Geography: the company states registrations in 125 countries; its rotavirus and typhoid conjugate vaccines are WHO-prequalified, which is the gateway to UN agency procurement for lower-income countries, alongside continued domestic sales into India’s immunisation programme.
• The surprise: the product that made Bharat Biotech famous, Covaxin, is not what is generating its revenue today — the FY24–FY25 numbers above show the company’s post-pandemic base built substantially on older, lower-profile vaccines developed over the preceding two decades, not on COVID-19 products.

The risks

• Revenue concentration and volatility: the swing from ₹1,501.2 crore (FY21) to ₹8,148.1 crore (FY22) and back to ₹1,462.9 crore (FY25) shows how dependent reported results can be on a single pandemic-scale product cycle; a similarly lumpy order — or its absence — can move revenue by multiples in either direction.
• Regulatory and quality-compliance risk across jurisdictions: Brazil’s ANVISA found GMP violations in March 2021 and the WHO suspended UN-channel supply in April 2022 over GMP deficiencies at the same manufacturing operation; export revenue depends on passing inspection regimes that have flagged problems twice in as many years.
• Trust and disclosure risk: the January 2021 emergency authorisation ahead of efficacy data, the US FDA’s refusal to grant Covaxin emergency use approval, and a November 2022 STAT News investigation alleging discrepancies between trial protocols and published results (which a Bharat Biotech director linked to political pressure to move fast) together form a documented pattern of scrutiny over trial rigor that can constrain future market access and reputation, independent of the science itself.

The takeaway

Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin decade shows what it costs to buy speed with evidence you don’t yet have. Moving first, in January 2021, won the company a place in India’s national vaccination programme and a revenue spike most biotech firms never see. But every subsequent setback the company faced — the Brazil regulator’s findings, the WHO’s supply suspension, the FDA’s refusal, the investigative reporting — traces back to the same root decision to authorise before the efficacy data existed. The lesson generalises beyond vaccines: in any business where the product’s value depends on other people’s trust in your process, sequencing — proving before shipping, not shipping before proving — is not a formality you can make up later. You can eventually publish the data, as Bharat Biotech did in The Lancet, and still spend years re-earning the credibility that a different sequence would have preserved from the start.

Frequently asked questions

What does Bharat Biotech make?

Vaccines and biotherapeutics sold mainly to governments and multilateral health bodies, including a rotavirus vaccine, a typhoid conjugate vaccine, Hepatitis B and Japanese encephalitis vaccines, a rabies vaccine, an oral cholera vaccine, and the COVID-19 products Covaxin and iNCOVACC.

Is Bharat Biotech a listed company?

No. It is a private, 100% family-owned company. Bloomberg reported in February 2026 that it was considering an IPO of more than $500 million, but as of this writing the company has not confirmed the plan and no valuation has been disclosed.

What happened between Bharat Biotech, Covaxin and the WHO?

The WHO granted Covaxin an Emergency Use Listing in November 2021, then suspended its supply through UN procurement agencies on 2 April 2022 after a March 2022 inspection found good manufacturing practice deficiencies at the plant, while stating the vaccine’s efficacy and safety data still held up.

How much did Bharat Biotech’s revenue change because of COVID-19?

Revenue rose from ₹1,501.2 crore in FY21 to ₹8,148.1 crore in FY22 on Covaxin supply, then fell back to ₹1,323.2 crore in FY24 and ₹1,462.9 crore in FY25 as COVID-19 vaccine demand collapsed.

Was Covaxin’s approval controversial?

Yes. India’s regulator authorised it for restricted emergency use on 3 January 2021 before Phase 3 efficacy data was available, a decision questioned by experts and opposition politicians at the time; a November 2022 STAT News investigation later alleged discrepancies in trial conduct, which Bharat Biotech and the Indian government publicly disputed as a “misleading” and “targeted narrative.”

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Bharat Biotech, “History & Milestones,” company website (accessed September 2026)
• Forbes India, “Krishna Ella: How A Farmer’s Son Gave India Its First Successful Indigenous Covid-19 Vaccine” (2021)
• Wikipedia, “Bharat Biotech” (accessed September 2026)
• Wikipedia, “Krishna Ella” (accessed September 2026)
• PATH, “India-made rotavirus vaccine achieves World Health Organization prequalification” (January 2018)
• PATH, “Developing the world’s first malaria vaccine (RTS,S)” (accessed September 2026)
• Devex, “GSK grants India’s Bharat Biotech licensing rights to malaria vaccine” (2021)
• Bharat Biotech, Typbar-TCV product page (accessed September 2026)
• ICRA, “Bharat Biotech International Limited: Ratings reaffirmed,” rating rationale (March 2023)
• Outlook Business, “Covaxin Maker Bharat Biotech Considers IPO, Likely to Raise $500 Mn” (27 February 2026)
• Tofler, Bharat Biotech International Limited company financial summary (accessed September 2026)
• Science/AAAS, “Exports of an Indian COVID-19 vaccine halted after WHO finds problems at manufacturing plant” (2021)
• World Health Organization, “Suspension of supply of COVID-19 vaccine (COVAXIN®)” (2 April 2022)
• Bloomberg, “WHO Approves Indian-Made Covid-19 Vaccine for Emergency Use” (3 November 2021)
• The Wire Science, “US FDA Denies Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin Emergency Use Approval” (2022)
• India TV News, “Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin phase 3 data shows 77.8 pc efficacy against COVID, says Lancet” (November 2021)
• Deccan Herald, “Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin 77.8% effective in phase 3 trial, shows data” (November 2021)
• Business Standard, “Bharat Biotech rolls out India’s first intra-nasal Covid vaccine iNCOVACC” (26 January 2023)
• India TV News, “COVID-19: Mansukh Mandaviya launches world’s 1st Made-in-India nasal vaccine iNCOVACC” (26 January 2023)
• The Print, “How Bharat Biotech & Covaxin got caught in a swirl of controversy” (2022)
• The Wire, “Covaxin Was Rushed Under Political Pressure, Need for Speed: STAT Report” (November 2022)
• Business Today, “Bharat Biotech, Health Ministry rubbish claims that Covaxin was ‘rushed due to political pressure'” (17 November 2022)
• Tribune India, “Brazil suspends Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin clinical trials” (2021)
• Deccan Herald, “Bharat Biotech terminates Covaxin deal with Brazil’s Precisa” (July 2021)
• The Print, “Govt buys Covishield at Rs 200 and Covaxin at Rs 295 per dose, set to deliver across India” (2021)
• Bharat Biotech, corporate overview page — 125 country registrations, cumulative doses supplied (accessed September 2026)

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