Startup Deep Dive : Mylab Discovery Solutions — the Covid test pioneer whose revenue fell nearly 89% in two years

In the financial year of the pandemic, a molecular-diagnostics company that most Indians had never heard of booked roughly ₹825 crore (about $86 million) in operating income. Two years later that number had collapsed to ₹94.27 crore, an audited fall of nearly 89% — and the company had slipped from comfortable profit into a ₹42.41 crore loss.

The company is Mylab Discovery Solutions, the Pune firm that built the first Made-in-India Covid-19 RT-PCR test kit to win commercial approval in March 2020. This is the story of a business that did something genuinely hard, rode a once-in-a-century demand spike, and then had to prove it could survive after the spike vanished. Backed by the Poonawalla family behind the Serum Institute of India, and now holding the worldwide rights to a tuberculosis vaccine, Mylab is a case study in what happens to a company after its defining moment passes.

Quick facts

What Mylab actually does

Mylab is a molecular-diagnostics manufacturer: it develops and sells the test kits and instruments that laboratories, blood banks and hospitals use to detect disease at the level of DNA and RNA. According to the CARE Ratings press release of May 2025, its range covers human diagnostics, food safety, agriculture and veterinary medicine, and it offers CE-IVD marked real-time PCR kits made to ISO 13485 standards. The same document lists its detection kits for HIV, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, Covid-19, tuberculosis, cancer, genetic disorders, and parasitic, viral and bacterial infections. Mylab was the first company in India to make ID-NAT screening kits — used by blood banks to screen donated blood for HIV, HBV and HCV, as recorded on the company’s Wikipedia entry.

The origin: a diagnostics firm before the world needed one

Mylab Discovery Solutions was incorporated in 2016 in Pune. Its founders were Hasmukh Rawal, described by CARE Ratings as a biotechnologist-turned-entrepreneur with experience in the commercial development of applied molecular-diagnostics solutions, and Shailendra Kawade, the co-founder and chairman, credited with more than 15 years in the life-science industry. The founding idea was unglamorous but durable: India imported most of its sophisticated diagnostic kits, and a domestic manufacturer that could make them to international quality standards, at Indian cost, had a real market to serve.

For its first four years, Mylab was a small, specialist player. It built out a portfolio of real-time RT-PCR kits and became, by its own account, the first Indian firm to make ID-NAT blood-screening kits. It was profitable and technically credible, but obscure — the kind of B2B manufacturer that laboratory buyers knew and the wider public did not. The insight that mattered was already in place before anyone had heard the word Covid-19: if you can design and validate a nucleic-acid test in-house and manufacture it at scale locally, you can move faster than importers when a new pathogen appears. In early 2020 that capability stopped being a quiet advantage and became the whole story.

The struggle years: after the boom, the bust

Mylab’s hardest period did not come before its success — it came after. Once the pandemic testing wave receded, the company’s scale fell off a cliff. Total operating income dropped from roughly ₹825 crore in FY21 to ₹259.73 crore in FY22 and then to ₹94.27 crore in FY23, according to the audited figures cited by CARE Ratings in May 2025. Profit went with it: a ₹17.14 crore profit after tax in FY22 turned into a ₹42.41 crore loss in FY23, and the operating margin (PBILDT) swung from a positive ₹32.14 crore to a negative ₹53.76 crore.

The financial strain showed up everywhere in the balance sheet. CARE Ratings noted that overall gearing worsened from 1.49 times as on 31 March 2022 to 2.48 times a year later, while interest cover collapsed from 5.82 times to minus 3.55 times. The working-capital cycle stretched to about 383 days in FY23 from 128 days a year earlier, with average collection days of around 304 — the report attributed this partly to receivables stuck with government bodies. To keep the business running, the promoters infused interest-free unsecured loans of up to ₹145 crore, of which ₹143.50 crore was still outstanding on 31 March 2023, and the company generated negative cash accruals of about ₹40 crore that year. A second, structural setback compounded the demand collapse: Mylab had expected revenue from a national tuberculosis programme to begin in FY23, but CARE Ratings recorded that the campaign’s execution was delayed and that revenue did not materialise. The rating agency’s verdict tracked the decline — CARE cut the rating from CARE A (August 2022) to CARE A- (June 2023), then to CARE BB+ (February 2024) and finally to CARE BB- with the issuer marked non-cooperating in May 2025.

The turning point: six weeks in early 2020

The single event that made Mylab was the development of its Covid-19 test. As the first cases spread in early 2020, Mylab’s team — led by research chief Minal Dakhave Bhosale — designed and validated a diagnostic kit in about six weeks. On 23 March 2020, as Business Today reported, the Mylab PathoDetect Covid-19 Qualitative PCR kit became the first Made-in-India Covid-19 test kit to receive commercial approval, cleared by the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation and validated by the Indian Council of Medical Research. Contemporary coverage in BioSpectrum and DQIndia carried the same claim, and reporting noted the kit returned a result in about 2.5 hours against the 7-plus hours of existing protocols, with Mylab stating it had achieved full sensitivity and specificity in the ICMR evaluation.

The numbers on either side of that approval tell the story. Before it, Mylab was a four-year-old specialist whose profit-before-depreciation margins had ranged between 12.38% and 31.57% across FY18 to FY22, per CARE Ratings — healthy, but on a small base. After it, the company recorded roughly ₹825 crore of operating income in FY21. A little over a year later it went further into the consumer market: on 19 May 2021, Business Today reported that ICMR had approved CoviSelf, which Mylab and independent researchers writing in a peer-reviewed study described as India’s first home-use Covid-19 rapid antigen self-test, priced at ₹250. For a brief window, a Pune B2B manufacturer had become a household name.

The money behind it

Mylab has never been a conventional venture-funded startup; its capital story is dominated by the Poonawalla family and by promoter support rather than a stack of institutional rounds.

• Poonawalla group control: Per CARE Ratings (May 2025), Dr Cyrus Poonawalla — promoter of the Serum Institute of India — holds 10% in Mylab in his personal capacity, and 32.5% is held by Rising Sun Holdings Private Limited, owned and controlled by Adar Poonawalla. CARE describes the Poonawalla group as holding a controlling stake and extending technical and need-based support.
• Adar Poonawalla — seed backing (April 2020): Inc42’s funding tracker records an early seed round in April 2020 involving Adar C. Poonawalla, coinciding with the launch of the Covid kit.
• Zydus Lifesciences — corporate round (23 June 2023): Inc42 records a corporate/strategic round of $12.93 million from Zydus Lifesciences; Inc42 puts total tracked external funding at $12.93 million across the disclosed rounds.
• Serum Institute loan support: CARE Ratings noted that, as on 31 March 2023, Mylab had ₹100 crore of outstanding loans from Serum Institute of India Private Limited (SIIPL), alongside the promoters’ interest-free loans of up to ₹145 crore.
• Debt facilities: As of the May 2025 review, Mylab had ₹360 crore of rated long-term bank facilities (a ₹122 crore term loan and ₹238 crore in working-capital limits), per CARE Ratings.

How Mylab makes money

Mylab is a product manufacturer, not a testing lab, so its economics look more like industrial manufacturing than like a diagnostics-services chain.

• Money in: revenue comes from selling diagnostic kits and instruments to laboratories, hospitals, blood banks and — during the pandemic and via CoviSelf — directly to consumers. Institutional and government orders are a meaningful channel.
• Costs out: the FY23 cost base, as analysed by Entrackr (July 2024), included total expenditure of about ₹185 crore, of which manufacturing/material cost was roughly ₹50 crore (about 27% of the total), with the balance in employee benefits, legal fees, advertising, royalty and other overheads.
• Where the margin sits: in normal years the margin sat in high-value molecular kits; CARE Ratings recorded PBILDT margins of 12.38% to 31.57% across FY18–FY22. When volumes fell, fixed overheads turned the margin sharply negative — Entrackr calculated the EBITDA margin swinging from 14.81% in FY22 to minus 24.19% in FY23.
• The part people get wrong: a large share of pandemic-era revenue came from government and institutional buyers, and CARE flagged that receivables were stuck with government bodies — so booked revenue did not convert cleanly into cash, which is why the working-capital cycle blew out to 383 days.

The numbers

The figures below are the audited results cited by CARE Ratings (May 2025), with the FY23 total-income and cost detail cross-checked against Entrackr (July 2024). Audited public figures beyond FY23 are not available — CARE marked Mylab as non-cooperating, meaning it stopped submitting information for rating review.

Supporting ratios from the same CARE Ratings review: overall gearing rose from 1.49x (FY22) to 2.48x (FY23); interest coverage fell from 5.82x to -3.55x; the working-capital cycle stretched from 128 days to 383 days. Entrackr reported FY23 total income including other income at about ₹124 crore (roughly ₹95 crore from operations plus about ₹29 crore of interest and miscellaneous income).

Where the money comes from

Mylab does not publish a clean segment-by-segment revenue split, so the honest picture is a mix of what the filings and rating reports disclose rather than a precise pie chart. The verifiable contours:

• Covid-19 diagnostics drove the boom and the bust: the ~₹825 crore FY21 peak and the ₹94.27 crore FY23 trough map almost exactly onto the rise and fall of pandemic testing demand, as both CARE Ratings and Entrackr describe.
• Core molecular diagnostics is the base business: blood-bank ID-NAT screening (HIV, HBV, HCV), plus kits for cancer, genetic disorders and infectious disease, form the non-Covid revenue base that predates 2020.
• Tuberculosis is the intended next engine: CARE Ratings detailed a tripartite agreement between Mylab, ICMR and Serum Institute for an end-to-end TB solution — SIIPL developed a TB vaccine (rBCG) and a skin test (CY-TB), and Mylab holds the exclusive worldwide marketing and distribution rights, alongside its own TB detection kit.
• The surprise: a company famous for a consumer self-test still earns predominantly from institutional and government channels — and its single largest hoped-for growth line, TB, had generated no revenue as of the FY23 review because the national programme’s rollout was delayed.

The risks

• Demand concentration and the post-Covid air pocket: the near-89% revenue fall from FY21 to FY23 (CARE Ratings) shows how exposed Mylab was to a single, temporary demand source. Rebuilding a durable non-Covid revenue base is the central challenge, and the FY23 loss of ₹42.41 crore is the measure of how far there is to go.
• Liquidity and dependence on promoter support: CARE Ratings described liquidity as “stretched,” with ₹143.50 crore of promoter loans and ₹100 crore of Serum loans outstanding on 31 March 2023, negative cash accruals of about ₹40 crore in FY23, and gearing at 2.48x. The business has needed related-party funding to keep running.
• Execution risk on tuberculosis: CARE flagged the delayed TB campaign as a key monitorable — the segment Mylab is counting on for its next phase depends on a government programme whose timing it does not control.
• Governance and disclosure signal: CARE Ratings downgraded Mylab to CARE BB- and kept it under “issuer not cooperating” in May 2025 because the company stopped supplying information for rating review — a red flag for lenders and one reason audited figures beyond FY23 are not public.

The takeaway

Mylab’s arc is a lesson about the difference between a moment and a business. The capability that produced the Covid kit — in-house design, local validation, fast manufacturing to international standards — was real, hard-won and built before the pandemic; it was not luck. But a capability that pays off spectacularly in one extraordinary year still has to earn its keep in ordinary ones, and the ~₹825 crore-to-₹94 crore fall shows how brutally a demand-driven windfall can reverse. The transferable lesson is that the second act is harder than the first: the same discipline that lets a company seize a crisis has to be redirected, quickly, into products people will buy after the crisis ends. Whether Mylab’s tuberculosis rights and its rumoured 2026 global joint venture become that second act is the open question the numbers cannot yet answer.

Frequently asked questions

What does Mylab Discovery Solutions make?

Mylab is a Pune-based molecular-diagnostics manufacturer. It makes real-time PCR test kits and instruments used by laboratories, hospitals and blood banks to detect diseases including HIV, hepatitis B and C, Covid-19, tuberculosis, cancer and genetic disorders, plus kits for food safety, agriculture and veterinary testing, per CARE Ratings (May 2025).

Was Mylab really behind India’s first Covid-19 test kit?

Yes. The Mylab PathoDetect Covid-19 PCR kit was the first Made-in-India Covid-19 test kit to receive commercial approval, cleared by the CDSCO and validated by ICMR, as reported by Business Today and BioSpectrum on 23 March 2020. Mylab later launched CoviSelf, described as India’s first home rapid-antigen self-test, approved by ICMR in May 2021 at ₹250.

How much money does Mylab make?

Its audited total operating income was about ₹825 crore in FY21, ₹259.73 crore in FY22 and ₹94.27 crore in FY23, per CARE Ratings (May 2025). It reported a net profit of ₹17.14 crore in FY22 and a net loss of ₹42.41 crore in FY23. Audited figures for years after FY23 are not publicly available.

Who owns Mylab Discovery Solutions?

The Poonawalla family behind the Serum Institute of India holds a controlling block. Per CARE Ratings (May 2025), Dr Cyrus Poonawalla holds 10% personally and Rising Sun Holdings, controlled by Adar Poonawalla, holds 32.5%. Zydus Lifesciences invested $12.93 million in a corporate round in June 2023, per Inc42.

Is Mylab listed on the stock market?

No. Mylab Discovery Solutions is a privately held company (CIN U74999PN2016PTC164780) and is not listed on any stock exchange. No public valuation could be verified from two independent sources for this piece.

Sources

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

• CARE Ratings (CareEdge) — rating press release, Mylab Discovery Solutions Private Limited, May 2025 (audited FY22 and FY23 financials, shareholding, promoter and Serum loans, TB agreement, rating history)
• Entrackr — “Mylab’s op revenue nosedives to under Rs 100 Cr in FY23, slips into losses,” July 2024 (FY23 total income, expenditure and margin detail)
• Inc42 — Mylab Discovery Solutions funding profile, 2026 (funding rounds, Zydus and Adar Poonawalla, employee count)
• Business Today — “First Made in India COVID-19 test kit by Mylab gets commercial approval,” March 2020
• BioSpectrum India / DQIndia — coverage of CDSCO approval of Mylab’s Covid-19 PCR kit, March 2020
• Business Today — “ICMR approves Mylab’s self-use kit CoviSelf,” May 2021, and a peer-reviewed CoviSelf validation study, PMC/NCBI, 2021
• Digital Health News / Medical Buyer — Serum Institute and Trivitron talks to scale Mylab’s global diagnostics play, August 2026
• Wikipedia — Mylab Discovery Solutions (company history, products, ID-NAT and CoviSelf background)
• Tracxn / TheCompanyCheck — corporate identity number and incorporation details

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