Startup Deep Dive : Loopworm — the Bengaluru bug farm chasing pharma-grade proteins from silkworms

Loopworm booked ₹4.5 crore (about $0.47 million) in revenue in the year to March 2025, as reported by Inc42 — a modest number next to the ₹5.70 crore net loss the company’s own regulatory filings showed for the year before that. Yet the Bengaluru company is not chasing novelty snack food or a quick flip; its co-founder talks about replacing bioreactors with silkworms.

Today Loopworm’s real business is unglamorous: rendering silkworm pupae discarded by India’s silk industry, along with farmed black soldier fly larvae, into protein meal and an omega-3-rich fat for feed mills from Andhra Pradesh to Scandinavia. But the same silkworms are also being turned into living factories for recombinant proteins destined for diagnostics and animal vaccines — a bet, traced here through two funding rounds, a founder’s first failed startup, a hard pivot away from farmers, and a regulatory approval that took six years to land, on whether an insect farm can out-manufacture a pharmaceutical plant.

Quick facts

What they do

Loopworm is a Bengaluru biomanufacturing company that farms and processes insects — mainly silkworm (Bombyx mori) pupae and black soldier fly larvae — into protein concentrate and fat for other companies to put into animal feed, aquafeed and pet food. It sells to feed manufacturers, not directly to farmers or consumers: the company buys or sources dried insect biomass from a network of independent silk-reeling units and insect farmers, dry-renders it at a Bengaluru facility, and ships out protein meal (branded LoopMeal) and oil (LoopOil) under long-term supply contracts. Its named customers include Indian feed majors CP Feeds and Ananda Group, plus aquaculture and pet food buyers as far afield as Thailand, Vietnam, Scandinavia and, more recently, a large global salmon feed manufacturer. Alongside the feed business, Loopworm is building a second, pre-revenue line: using silkworms as “living factories” to manufacture recombinant proteins — lab-grade proteins normally made in bioreactors — for diagnostics, animal vaccines and eventually human biologics.

The origin

Bagaria and Gawri met at Enactus, the student social-entrepreneurship network, while studying at IIT Roorkee, where they had already worked together on projects trying to upcycle flower, plastic and paper waste. After graduating in 2019, the pair wanted to build something around India’s food-waste problem specifically. They looked first at the paper and plastic streams they already knew, and concluded those markets were crowded and had functioning reverse-logistics chains. Food waste did not: nobody was collecting it in a form anyone could use. That gap, rather than a fondness for insects as such, is what pointed them at insect farming — black soldier fly larvae and silkworms both convert organic waste into protein and fat quickly, on very little land or water, which is the pitch Bagaria has repeated in interviews: insects “don’t need a lot of arable land or potable water,” and their farming produces a small fraction of the greenhouse-gas load of composting the same waste. They incorporated Loopworm Private Limited in Bengaluru on 12 September 2019.

The struggle years

Loopworm was not Bagaria’s first attempt at a startup, and it was not an easy build either. Before Loopworm, Bagaria had spent three years on AgroSnap, a crop-leaf-imaging system meant to guide fertiliser use; by his own account to Inc42, the underlying technology worked, but he and his co-founders “didn’t think through the business model” — there was no clear way to charge for it or operate it at scale, and it folded. He carried that lesson, about matching a product to a business model rather than just to a technical problem, straight into Loopworm.

The early Loopworm years were slower than the funding headlines suggest. According to the company’s own account in its 2024 Forbes India 30 Under 30 profile, the founders spent roughly 2019 to 2021 simply standardising how to rear insects reliably at any scale, financed by government and philanthropic grants — reportedly around $150,000 in total, from sources that Inc42 lists as including BIRAC, RKVY, Elevate Karnataka, Tata Trusts, the Gates Foundation and the H&M Foundation — before they had a sellable product. Then, at the end of 2021, they hit a design flaw in the original business model: Loopworm had planned to supply live or dried insects directly to farmers, but found that insects on their own were too nutrient-dense to work as a standalone feed — animals needed a balanced ration, not a concentrated protein bomb. That forced a repositioning away from farmers and toward feed manufacturers, who could blend Loopworm’s meal and oil into a properly formulated ration. It is the same restructuring, in miniature, that had already killed AgroSnap: a good biological answer with the wrong customer sitting on top of it, fixed only by inserting a formulator between Loopworm and the animal.

The turning point

The clearest inflection point on the public record is regulatory, not financial. As of the middle of 2025, Loopworm’s Bengaluru facility — rated at 6,000 tonnes of insect protein a year — was running at only around 10 to 20 percent of capacity, producing roughly 50 to 100 tonnes of meal and oil a month, according to AgFunderNews and AgNavigator. India’s food-safety and aquaculture rules did not clearly permit Loopworm’s products to be used as a direct farm-level input, only as an ingredient sold on to formulators, which capped how directly the company could sell and how fast it could scale.

That changed on 24 September 2025, when the Coastal Aquaculture Authority of India certified Loopworm’s protein and fat products for direct use as additives, attractants and palatants in aquaculture nutrition at the farm level — a change co-founder and CEO Ankit Alok Bagaria described as positioning Loopworm “as a credible supplier, aligning with global pet food safety and animal feed standards,” as reported by The Fish Site. The approval opened a path to sell past the formulator and straight into farm-level aquaculture supply chains, and it landed alongside a separate commercial win: Loopworm secured a supply order for roughly 1,000 tonnes a year from a major global salmon feed manufacturer, part of a push the company said should let animal-nutrition exports carry roughly 70 percent of its revenue going forward, per AgNavigator’s June 2025 reporting. The company has told Inc42 it expects that shift to help revenue jump from FY25’s ₹4.5 crore to a projected ₹15 to 18 crore in FY26 — a three-to-four-times increase, though it remains a company projection rather than an audited result.

The money behind it

Loopworm has raised two disclosed institutional rounds, on top of early grant funding, totalling roughly $6.65 million:

• Pre-institutional grants (2019–2022): approximately $150,000 from a mix of government and philanthropic sources including BIRAC, RKVY, Elevate Karnataka, Tata Trusts, the Gates Foundation and the H&M Foundation, as listed by Inc42 — used to fund the rearing-standardisation work before any commercial product existed.
• Seed round — $3.4 million, announced 24 August 2022: co-led by Omnivore and WaterBridge Ventures, with participation from Titan Capital and angel investors including Godrej Agrovet chairman Nadir Godrej, former ITC R&D head Sanjiv Rangrass and Log9 Materials founder Akshay Singhal (Entrackr; AgFunderNews). For Omnivore, an agrifood-focused venture fund, this was the second investment under its OmniX Bio life-sciences initiative, and the money was earmarked for talent, R&D and building the North Bengaluru commercial plant.
• Pre-Series A — $3.25 million, announced 1 July 2025: co-led by WaterBridge Ventures (returning) and Enrission India Capital, a Japan-based venture firm; Inc42 rounds the same round to $3.3 million. Proceeds are earmarked for commercialising the recombinant-protein platform, a new facility for that line, and expanding the patent portfolio.

Loopworm’s valuation is not officially disclosed by the company — Entrackr’s coverage of the pre-Series A round explicitly notes it was not shared — but two independent trackers have estimated it close in time to the raise: Inc42 puts it at $20.07 million as of 2 July 2025, and TheKredible at ₹171 crore, about $20.5 million, as of 29 May 2025. The two figures, roughly five weeks apart, sit in the same $20 million-odd band, though both should be read as tracker estimates rather than a confirmed post-money number.

How it makes money

The business today is a straightforward ingredient-supply model, with a speculative second line layered on top:

• Core revenue — insect protein meal and oil: Loopworm dry-renders silkworm pupae and black soldier fly larvae sourced from roughly 9,000 external suppliers (per AgNavigator) rather than farming insects itself, then sells the resulting meal and fat, at a reported $1.50 to $4 per kilogram, to feed manufacturers for aquaculture, poultry and pet food (AgFunderNews).
• Where the margin currently sits — nowhere yet: at roughly 10 to 20 percent of its 6,000-tonne annual capacity, the Bengaluru plant is carrying fixed costs — rent, equipment, staff — far beyond what its current throughput can cover; the company’s own FY24 filings show a gross margin of roughly -232 percent, meaning the direct cost of producing what it sold exceeded the revenue from selling it, before overheads (TheCompanyCheck’s compilation of the FY24 filing).
• The emerging, higher-margin line — recombinant proteins: using silkworms as “transient expression” hosts — injecting them with a genetic vector so their bodies manufacture a target protein, which is harvested days later — to produce proteins such as EGF, FGF, TGF-beta and human serum albumin for diagnostics and animal-vaccine customers, bypassing the capital-heavy bioreactors that conventional biologics manufacturing needs (AgFunderNews, April 2026).
• The part the company’s own numbers don’t quite agree on: Bagaria has told Inc42 the platform could bring biologics manufacturing costs down to “between half and a fifth” of conventional methods, while AgFunderNews separately reported a company claim of a 40-times cost reduction versus precision fermentation. Both are pre-commercial, self-reported estimates rather than audited unit economics, and they do not fully reconcile with each other.
• Regulatory status of that line: Loopworm has research-and-development approval from Indian authorities for its recombinant-protein work, but commercial sales authorisation for those proteins had not yet been granted as of AgFunderNews’s April 2026 reporting; the company has filed one patent and has a second pending.

The numbers

Loopworm is a private company and does not publish audited results; the figures below are drawn from its Registrar of Companies filings, as compiled by financial-data aggregators, and from company-reported figures carried by Inc42. All amounts are in ₹ crore.

Read together, the pattern is a company whose losses grew faster than its revenue through FY23 and FY24 — consistent with a facility built for far more volume than it was yet selling — followed by a reported jump in FY25 revenue that, if the FY26 projection holds, would represent the first year growth in sales starts to outpace the cost base built up earlier.

Where the money comes from

• Product split: essentially all disclosed revenue currently comes from insect protein meal (LoopMeal) and oil (LoopOil) sold as feed ingredients; the recombinant-protein platform and a biostimulant product trialled with ICAR-IIPR on legumes are both pre-revenue as of the latest reporting (Inc42, April 2026).
• Domestic channel: shrimp and poultry feed manufacturers in Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and West Bengal, plus feed majors CP Feeds and Ananda Group (Inc42; AgNavigator).
• Export channel, the growth engine: aquaculture and pet food buyers in Thailand, Vietnam, Scandinavia and across Europe, with trial shipments completed to more than 20 countries including the US, continental Europe, Southeast Asia and South America, and a secured supply order of roughly 1,000 tonnes a year from a major global salmon feed manufacturer (Inc42; AgNavigator, June 2025).
• Forward mix: the company expects animal-nutrition exports specifically to account for around 70 percent of total revenue going forward, calling that vertical “operationally profitable” even while the company overall is not (AgNavigator, June 2025; Inc42, April 2026).
• The surprise: the raw material for most of this is not farmed insects in the imagined sense but the discarded pupae of India’s centuries-old silk-reeling industry — a byproduct sericulture units used to throw away — now sourced from a network the company puts at roughly 9,000 suppliers and turned into an export commodity (AgNavigator).

The risks

• Under-used capacity meeting a widening loss: the Bengaluru plant was running at only 10 to 20 percent of its 6,000-tonne annual capacity through mid-2025 (AgFunderNews; AgNavigator), while FY24 filings already showed a net loss (₹5.70 crore) more than three times FY24 revenue (₹1.64 crore) and a negative gross margin — meaning every extra tonne currently produced needs to be sold at a price and volume that has not yet been demonstrated for the fixed-cost base to be covered.
• Regulatory approvals arrive one product, one country at a time: India’s Food Safety and Standards Act does not explicitly address insects as food, leaving a gap that novel-food rules only partly fill, and Loopworm’s own recombinant-protein line has R&D clearance but, as of April 2026, no commercial sales authorisation (AgFunderNews). The aquaculture farm-level approval that reshaped the business only arrived in September 2025, six years after founding — a reminder that each new product or market can face its own multi-year regulatory queue.
• Revenue concentration in a handful of accounts and one vertical: named customers are few (CP Feeds, Ananda Group, one unnamed global salmon feed manufacturer), and the company itself expects a single vertical — animal-nutrition exports — to carry around 70 percent of revenue going forward (AgNavigator). The loss, delay or renegotiation of any one of those relationships would fall disproportionately on a revenue base that was only ₹4.5 crore in FY25.

The takeaway

The most transferable lesson in Loopworm’s record so far is not about insects at all. Bagaria’s first startup, AgroSnap, reportedly had working technology and still failed because nobody had worked out who would pay for it and how. Loopworm’s own founding model made close to the same mistake — selling insects directly to farmers, discovered only after two years of R&D to be the wrong unit of value, since raw insect protein is too concentrated to be a balanced feed on its own. What actually unlocked growth was not a scientific breakthrough but a customer-model change: inserting itself as an ingredient supplier to formulators who already had distribution, rather than trying to reach the end farmer directly, followed by chasing the regulatory approvals that let it sell further down that same chain. A good biological process, on its own, was not a business; matching the product to how the buyer already buys, and to what the regulator already permits, is what turned years of grant-funded R&D into an export order book.

Frequently asked questions

What does Loopworm actually sell?

Loopworm sells insect-derived protein meal (LoopMeal) and fat (LoopOil), rendered mainly from silkworm pupae and black soldier fly larvae, to animal-feed, aquafeed and pet-food manufacturers. It is separately developing a pre-revenue recombinant-protein platform that uses silkworms to manufacture proteins for diagnostics and animal vaccines (Inc42, April 2026; AgFunderNews, April 2026).

Who founded Loopworm and when?

Ankit Alok Bagaria and Abhi Gawri, both IIT Roorkee graduates who met through the Enactus student network, incorporated Loopworm Private Limited in Bengaluru on 12 September 2019, immediately after graduating.

How much funding has Loopworm raised, and who backed it?

Loopworm has raised roughly $6.65 million across a $3.4 million seed round in August 2022, co-led by Omnivore and WaterBridge Ventures with Titan Capital and angel investors, and a $3.25 million (reported by Inc42 as $3.3 million) pre-Series A round in July 2025 co-led by WaterBridge Ventures and Enrission India Capital, on top of roughly $150,000 in earlier grants from bodies including BIRAC, the Gates Foundation and Tata Trusts.

Is Loopworm profitable?

No. Its regulatory filings show a net loss of ₹5.70 crore in FY24 against ₹1.64 crore of revenue, and its facility was still running at only around 10 to 20 percent of rated capacity through mid-2025. The company describes its animal-nutrition export vertical specifically as “operationally profitable,” but has not disclosed an overall FY25 profit or loss figure.

What is Loopworm worth?

The company has not officially disclosed a valuation. Independent trackers estimate it at $20.07 million as of 2 July 2025 (Inc42) and around ₹171 crore, roughly $20.5 million, as of 29 May 2025 (TheKredible) — figures in the same broad range but not confirmed by the company.

Sources

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

• Inc42, “How Loopworm Is Turning Insects Into Protein For Feed And Pharma”, April 2026
• Inc42, “Loopworm Nets $3.3 Mn To Manufacture Recombinant Proteins”, July 2025
• Inc42, “Loopworm Funding 2026 – Total Funding, Rounds & Investors” (company funding tracker), accessed September 2026
• AgFunderNews, “India’s first insect farming startup Loopworm secures $3.4m seed round led by Omnivore, WaterBridge”, August 2022
• AgFunderNews, “Worms to wealth? Loopworm scales up insect protein plant, plans recombinant proteins from silkworms”, April 2026
• Entrackr, “Agritech startup Loopworm raises $3.4 Mn in seed funding”, August 2022
• Entrackr, “Biomanufacturing startup Loopworm raises $3.25 Mn in pre-Series A round”, July 2025
• Forbes India, “Loopworm: Creating insect protein for livestock and even pet food”, February 2023
• Forbes India, “30 Under 30 2024: How Loopworm co-founders Ankit Bagaria and Abhi Gawri are building a silk route to profit with sustainability”, 2024
• The Fish Site, “India insect meal company wins approval for aquaculture use”, September 2025
• AgNavigator (formerly AgTechNavigator), “Insects with impact: Loopworm targets ten-fold growth with expansion into salmon, tuna feed markets”, June 2025
• TheCompanyCheck.com and Tofler.in, compilation of Loopworm Private Limited’s Registrar of Companies filings (FY23–FY24 revenue and net loss)
• TheKredible, Loopworm company profile (valuation as of 29 May 2025)

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