Startup Deep Dive : Premas Biotech — the tiny Gurugram CDMO behind an oral COVID vaccine

In March 2021, a lab in Manesar with fewer than 150 people said it had helped build a COVID-19 vaccine you could swallow, and that a single oral dose raised antibodies in animals. That claim landed on Nasdaq and in the global pharma press. The company behind the science, Premas Biotech, has audited revenue that has never reliably crossed roughly ₹28 crore (about $2.9 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0).

Premas is not a vaccine giant. It is a contract research and manufacturing shop for proteins, the kind of quiet business that other companies hire and rarely name. The gap between the size of the headline and the size of the balance sheet is the whole story here: how a small, founder-controlled Indian CDMO put its recombinant-protein platform inside a US-listed vaccine joint venture, and why the science outran the money.

Quick facts

What Premas Biotech actually does

Premas Biotech is a contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO) built around one hard scientific problem: making proteins that are difficult to make. Its customers are pharmaceutical and biotech companies, mostly outside India, that need a recombinant protein, an antibody, or a vaccine antigen produced quickly and cleanly enough to move into the clinic. Premas sells the work, not a branded drug of its own.

The company frames its offer around three proprietary platforms:

• D-Crypt: a yeast-based expression system paired with a library of more than 20 custom expression vectors, built to produce “difficult-to-express” proteins that standard hosts struggle with (company-stated).
• Axtex-4D: a three-dimensional cell-culture and tissue platform aimed at more realistic drug screening than flat 2D cultures (company-stated).
• C-Qwence: an antibody-discovery library used to find and develop therapeutic antibodies (company-stated).

The company says it has worked on more than 650 molecules since inception and employs a scientific and management team that it puts above 150 people, while third-party tracker Tracxn recorded about 115 employees as of August 2025. Treat the headcount as a range of roughly 115 to 150-plus depending on the source and date.

The origin: a protein problem worth solving

Premas was incorporated in late 2005, well before “Indian biotech startup” was a fashionable phrase. The founding trio matched an operator to two scientists, which is rarer than it sounds in deep-science ventures.

Avijit Das, the founder chairman, came from three decades in industry across Africa, the Middle East and Asia, with earlier stints at Tata Motors, Eicher and Duracell/Gillette (company-stated). He brought the commercial and cross-border instincts. Dr Prabuddha Kundu, the co-founder and managing director, holds a doctorate in biomedical engineering and, by the company’s account, has published more than 20 papers and holds around ten patents in protein engineering and bioprocess development. Dr Nupur Mehrotra Arora, co-founder and chief operating officer, trained in medicine and spent more than two decades as a clinician and researcher in infectious diseases and tuberculosis diagnostics.

The founding insight was unglamorous but durable: a large share of promising drug programmes stall not at the idea stage but at the bench, because the target protein is slow, expensive or impossible to express at quality. If you could industrialise the “difficult-to-express” problem, you would sit upstream of a lot of drug discovery, earning fees no matter whose molecule eventually won. That is the position Premas set out to occupy, and D-Crypt is the expression of it.

The struggle years

Deep-science services are a slow, cash-hungry business, and Premas grew the hard way rather than on venture rocket fuel. Two features of its history stand out, both unsoftened:

First, the funding was thin for a company doing wet-lab science. Across its life Premas has raised only about $2.56 million in disclosed external capital, and it did so largely from angels rather than institutional venture funds, with the bulk of that money arriving in an April 2022 round more than 16 years after incorporation. A protein CDMO that reaches its late teens still running on a few million dollars of outside money has been living on customer revenue and founder capital, not on rounds.

Second, its most visible programme, the oral COVID-19 vaccine, went from global headline to commercial dead end inside roughly two years. The vaccine was developed for a US joint venture, Oravax Medical, and its partner Oramed later wound down the COVID push as the pandemic-vaccine market collapsed under Pfizer and Moderna and waning demand. The science produced antibodies; the market produced no buyer at scale. For a small company, betting scarce scientific bandwidth on a programme it did not control, and that then stalled, is exactly the near-death shape that deep-tech founders fear.

The turning point: Oravax and the oral vaccine

The single event that put Premas on the global map was the formation of Oravax Medical Inc. in March 2021. The joint venture combined Premas Biotech’s protein and virus-like-particle (VLP) technology with the oral protein-delivery platform (POD) of Oramed Pharmaceuticals, a Nasdaq-listed company.

The numbers on either side of that event are stark. Before it, Premas was an anonymous Indian CDMO. After it, its VLP antigen was inside a US-listed vaccine venture in which, per Oramed’s SEC filings, Oramed received 1,890,000 shares equal to about 63% of Oravax at formation. The other named stockholders in the venture included Akers Biosciences, Premas Biotech, Cutter Mill Capital and Run Ridge, so Premas held a minority slice of the upside, not control.

The science itself was genuinely novel:

• Design: a triple-antigen VLP vaccine targeting three SARS-CoV-2 surface proteins at once, the Spike, Membrane and Envelope, built using Premas’s D-Crypt platform (company and JV statements, March 2021).
• Delivery: taken orally, using Oramed’s POD technology, which would sidestep cold-chain and needle logistics if it worked at scale.
• Early signal: the March 2021 announcement reported an antibody response after a single oral dose in an animal study (company-stated, preclinical).
• Clinical readout: preliminary Phase 1 data from a first cohort in South Africa later showed a significant antibody response, described as a 2-6 fold rise over baseline in the majority of dosed participants (Oravax/Oramed, preliminary).

The turning point cut both ways. It validated Premas’s platform in front of a global audience and a listed partner, and it also showed the limit of a services company’s leverage: the asset lived inside someone else’s cap table, and its fate tracked a market Premas could not steer.

The money behind it

Premas has stayed unusually founder-controlled for a science company, and its capital structure reflects a deliberately lean approach.

• Total raised: about $2.56 million in disclosed external funding over its life (Crunchbase).
• Latest round: about $2.68 million, dated 16 April 2022 (Tracxn), backed largely by angel investors rather than a lead institutional fund.
• Investor base: roughly 25 angel investors according to tracker data, with no single dominant venture backer publicly disclosed.
• Founder ownership: Tracxn attributes about 27.1% of the company to its founders and about 5.0% to angels, with the remainder held by other entities; the exact cap table is not public.
• Founder net worth: the founders’ combined stake was valued at about ₹17.5 crore as of 16 August 2022 (Tracxn); a post-money company valuation from that period is not disclosed.

What the money bought was survival and a platform, not blitzscale. The absence of a large institutional round is the defining fact of Premas’s finances: it explains both the founders’ continued control and the company’s modest revenue ceiling.

How it makes money

Premas earns the way a CDMO earns: it charges other companies to do the protein science they cannot or will not do in-house. The model, walked through:

• Money in: fees for integrated discovery and development services, cloning and cell-line development, expression, process development, scale-up and manufacturing, and custom assay work. Contracts are typically milestone- or project-based rather than product royalties.
• Where the margin sits: in the platforms. D-Crypt lets Premas take on “difficult-to-express” jobs that command a premium and that generic CDMOs cannot easily win, so the margin comes from scarce know-how, not from volume manufacturing.
• Costs out: skilled scientific salaries, lab consumables, reagents and equipment, and the fixed cost of running GMP-grade facilities, all of which are heavy relative to a software business and largely present whether or not a given project closes.
• The part people get wrong: the Oravax vaccine was not a product Premas sold to the public. Premas contributed technology and development work to a joint venture; the commercial upside sat with the JV and its majority owner, not on Premas’s own income statement. Its recurring revenue is services, not vaccine sales.

The numbers

Premas is a private company, so its detailed profit-and-loss statements are filed with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs but are not published in full without a paid data subscription. The figures below are the ones that could be verified from filing aggregators; where a source gives only a band, that is shown as a band rather than a made-up point estimate. Units are ₹ crore unless stated.

Two honest caveats. First, the exact net profit or loss for each year is not public, so this piece does not state one; the falling net worth in FY24 is a signal, not a stated loss. Second, trackers disagree at the edges, Tracxn’s point estimate of about ₹27.9 crore sits inside Tofler’s wider ₹25-50 crore band, so the revenue is best read as “high-twenties crore,” not a precise figure.

Where the money comes from

Premas does not publish a formal segment or geography split, so the shape below is drawn from how the business is described rather than from an audited breakdown:

• By activity: the core is recurring CDMO and discovery-services fees. Platform-led work (D-Crypt, Axtex-4D, C-Qwence) is the differentiator, but the revenue engine is contract services.
• By geography: the company positions itself as a partner to global pharma and biotech, so a meaningful share of revenue is export services to overseas clients rather than domestic sales.
• The surprise: the programme Premas is famous for, the oral COVID-19 vaccine, sits almost entirely outside its own revenue line. It flowed through the Oravax joint venture, where Oramed held about 63%. The headline asset and the cash engine are two different things, which is why a company known worldwide for a vaccine still reports high-twenties-crore services revenue.

The risks

The risks here are concrete and largely structural for a small deep-science CDMO:

• Programme concentration and lost control: the flagship vaccine lived inside a JV majority-owned by Oramed and tied to Cutter Mill, Run Ridge and Akers as co-owners. When Oramed’s COVID effort wound down, Premas had little ability to redirect the asset, and the upside it had helped create largely sat on someone else’s cap table.
• Thin capitalisation: with only about $2.56 million raised and no large institutional round, Premas has limited buffer to fund long, capital-intensive development cycles or to survive a stretch of weak order flow. Deep-science services need patient capital, and Premas has run lean.
• Scale and financial fragility: revenue in the high-twenties-crore range grew only about 4.9% in FY24 while net worth fell around 15.0% (Tofler), a combination that points to margin or investment pressure. A CDMO that cannot grow revenue faster than costs struggles to fund the very platforms that are its moat.
• Client and export dependence: a services firm reliant on a small number of global pharma contracts is exposed to project cancellations, pricing pressure from larger CDMOs, and currency swings on export revenue.

The takeaway

Premas Biotech is a lesson in the difference between building the science and owning the outcome. Its platform was good enough to put an Indian lab’s antigen inside a Nasdaq-listed vaccine venture, on a genuinely novel oral, triple-antigen design. But because the flagship asset lived inside a joint venture it did not control, the global headline never became a line on Premas’s own income statement, which stayed in the high-twenties crore. The transferable lesson for any deep-tech founder is blunt: a breakthrough you develop for someone else’s cap table is a credential, not a business. Value accrues to whoever owns the asset when the market finally shows up, and if that is not you, the science can succeed while the company stays small.

Frequently asked questions

What does Premas Biotech do?

Premas Biotech is a contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO) based in Manesar, Haryana. It produces difficult-to-express recombinant proteins, antibodies and vaccine antigens for pharmaceutical and biotech clients, using proprietary platforms it calls D-Crypt, Axtex-4D and C-Qwence.

Who founded Premas Biotech and when?

The company was incorporated on 28 November 2005. Its founders are Avijit Das (founder chairman), Dr Prabuddha Kundu (co-founder and managing director) and Dr Nupur Mehrotra Arora (co-founder and COO).

What was Premas Biotech’s role in the oral COVID-19 vaccine?

Premas contributed its virus-like-particle (VLP) and D-Crypt protein technology to Oravax Medical, a joint venture formed in March 2021 with Oramed Pharmaceuticals. Oramed’s oral delivery platform (POD) was paired with the Premas antigen. Per Oramed’s SEC filings, Oramed held about 63% of Oravax, so Premas was a minority partner in the venture.

How much money has Premas Biotech raised?

Public trackers record about $2.56 million in total disclosed funding, with the largest round of roughly $2.68 million dated 16 April 2022. The company is angel-backed and remains private, with no large institutional venture round disclosed.

What is Premas Biotech’s revenue?

For FY24 (year ended 31 March 2024), Tracxn estimates operating revenue of about ₹27.9 crore, while Tofler places it in a ₹25-50 crore band from MCA filings, with growth of roughly 4.9% year on year. The company is private and does not publish detailed profit figures.

Sources

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

• Premas Biotech, company website (About page), accessed September 2026
• ZaubaCorp, Premas Biotech Private Limited corporate record (CIN U24232HR2005PTC035932), accessed September 2026
• Tofler, Premas Biotech Private Limited financials and directors, accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, Premas Biotech company and legal-entity profiles (revenue, funding, employees, shareholding), accessed September 2026
• Crunchbase, Premas Biotech funding profile, accessed September 2026
• BusinessWire, “Premas Biotech and Oramed Announce Oral COVID-19 Vaccine Candidate That Produces Antibodies After a Single Dose,” March 2021
• Fierce Pharma, “Premas and Oramed unite to found oral COVID-19 vaccine startup,” March 2021
• Oramed Pharmaceuticals, SEC filings (Form 10-K FY2021) and press releases on the Oravax Medical joint venture, 2021
• PRNewswire India, Premas Biotech Phase 1 oral COVID-19 vaccine data for Oravax Medical, 2021

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