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Startup Deep Dive : Theranautilus — the IISc spin-off steering nanorobots by the billion into human teeth

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Theranautilus.

Theranautilus wants to put robots inside your teeth. Not robots the size of a grain of rice — each one is smaller than 300 nanometers, so small that roughly a billion of them fit into half a millilitre of water, and they are steered from outside the body with nothing more exotic than a magnetic field.

That is the easy part to believe, because it has already been demonstrated in a peer-reviewed journal. The harder part is the business: an Indian Institute of Science (IISc) spin-off that has raised just $1.26 million across two rounds and booked ₹33.1 lakh in revenue in FY25 is telling investors it intends to be the first company in the world to commercialise a nanorobotic medical device.

Quick facts

Company Theranautilus Private Limited
Founded 2020, Bengaluru — incubated at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc)
Founders Ambarish Ghosh (physicist, professor at IISc’s Centre for Nano Science and Engineering), Peddi Shanmukh Srinivas (dentist, CEO), Debayan Dasgupta (engineer)
Businesses Magnetically guided dental nanorobots — hypersensitivity relief (“CalBots”) and root-canal disinfection research
Latest FY revenue ₹33.1 lakh (about $34,500 at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) in FY25, up 0.15% year-on-year (Inc42 company database)
Latest FY profit/loss Not disclosed
Listed Private — no listing
Market value / last valuation Not disclosed; total raised $1.26 million across two seed rounds as of November 2024 (Tracxn, Crunchbase)
Key shareholders / CEO CEO Peddi Shanmukh Srinivas; investors include pi Ventures, Golden Sparrow Ventures, IIT Roorkee, and the three founders

What they do

Theranautilus builds nanometre-scale robots — helical or spherical particles built from biocompatible materials such as food-grade silica and trace iron — that are steered inside a patient’s mouth by an external, low-intensity magnetic field. The first commercial application is dental hypersensitivity: a device the company calls CalBots is guided into the dentinal tubules, the microscopic channels that run from the surface of a worn tooth to its nerve, where the particles self-assemble into a calcium-silicate plug that seals the tubule and blocks the pain signal, in principle after a single in-clinic or at-home application (Advanced Science, 11 August 2025; MedicalXpress, 11 August 2025). A second, earlier line of research aims the same steering technology at root-canal disinfection, sending nanobots deeper into tubules than ultrasound or laser cleaning can reach to kill bacteria that survive conventional treatment (Advanced Healthcare Materials, 2022; IISc, 16 May 2022). The buyer, eventually, is meant to be twofold: consumers buying an over-the-counter device for mild-to-moderate sensitivity, and dental clinics buying a professional version for severe cases (Inc42, November 2024).

The origin

The founding insight did not start in a dental clinic. It started in a physics lab. Ambarish Ghosh spent years working on magnetically controlled micro- and nanoparticles — first showing that such particles could be steered through fluids, blood and living cells — before returning to India to continue that work at IISc’s Centre for Nano Science and Engineering (CeNSE) (IISc, 16 May 2022). For most of that period the research had no obvious commercial home: it was, in the company’s own retelling, closer to a pure science experiment in moving very small objects very precisely than to a medical product. The pivot came when Peddi Shanmukh Srinivas, a trained dentist working alongside Ghosh’s group, recognised that dentistry offered an unusually forgiving first application for a steerable nanoparticle — a cavity that is easy to access from outside the body, does not require systemic delivery through the bloodstream, and has a large, underserved patient population in dental hypersensitivity (Inc42, 23 March 2025). Debayan Dasgupta, an engineer working on the same CeNSE research, became the third co-founder. Theranautilus was incorporated in 2020, formalising a collaboration the three had effectively been building for years inside the university lab (Inc42, 23 March 2025; IISc, 16 May 2022).

The struggle years

The gap between having a working laboratory result and having a fundable company was long, and it shows up plainly in the public record. The team’s first peer-reviewed dental result — nanobots that could penetrate root-canal tubules to a depth of 2,000 micrometres, more than twice what ultrasound or laser methods reach, and kill bacteria by generating localised heat — was published in Advanced Healthcare Materials only in 2022, two years after the company’s incorporation (Advanced Healthcare Materials, 2022; IISc, 16 May 2022). For roughly three years after founding, Theranautilus’s only recorded external capital was a single seed cheque of $60,300 from IIT Roorkee on 3 January 2023 — a sum that reads more like a proof-of-concept grant than a growth round (Tracxn, accessed September 2026; Crunchbase, accessed September 2026). No institutional venture money followed until November 2024, a near two-year wait that is unusually long even by the patient standards of Indian deep tech.

Alongside the funding gap sat a strategic one. The published science through 2022 was built around root-canal disinfection — a procedure that only a dentist can administer, inside an already invasive treatment, which limits both the addressable market and the speed of adoption. By the time the company raised its first meaningful institutional round in November 2024, the lead commercial story it told investors and journalists had shifted to dental hypersensitivity, a condition the company put at 20–32% of Indians and roughly one in four people worldwide, with a global market it sized at $6 billion (Inc42, November 2024; BioSpectrum India, 19 November 2024). Root-canal disinfection remains part of the technology roadmap, but it is no longer the product Theranautilus leads with — a repositioning made without a public announcement of the reasons behind it, and one investors would have had to take largely on faith when they wrote the November 2024 cheque.

The turning point

The clearest inflection point in the public record is the jump from that $60,300 IIT Roorkee grant in January 2023 to the $1.2 million seed round led by pi Ventures that closed in November 2024 — a roughly twenty-fold increase in outside capital in under two years (Tracxn, accessed September 2026; BioSpectrum India, 19 November 2024). On one side of that gap sat a company running on grant money and IISc incubation support, with animal trials still in progress and no ISO-certified manufacturing line. On the other side sat a company that could commit, in the same funding announcement, to building an ISO-certified manufacturing facility, preparing for human trials, and setting a commercial-launch target of 2026 (Inc42, November 2024; Inc42, 23 March 2025). The round brought in Golden Sparrow Ventures alongside pi Ventures, plus angel investors Abhishek Goyal (founder and CEO of Tracxn) and Lalit Keshre (CEO of Groww) — individually recognisable names whose participation did more to signal credibility to the wider Bengaluru startup ecosystem than the dollar amount alone (Inc42, November 2024; BioSpectrum India, 19 November 2024).

The money behind it

Theranautilus has raised a total of $1.26 million across two disclosed rounds, from roughly nine to ten investors (Tracxn, accessed September 2026):

No post-money valuation has been publicly disclosed for either round (Crunchbase, accessed September 2026). What each backer changed is visible mainly in what the company said it could now afford to do: pi Ventures’ round is the one Theranautilus itself credits with unlocking manufacturing scale-up and a defined human-trials timeline, while the earlier IIT Roorkee grant is better understood as validation capital that kept the lab-to-startup transition alive through 2023 (Inc42, November 2024).

How it makes money

Theranautilus has not yet launched a commercial product, so its business model is still a stated plan rather than a demonstrated one. The company has described its intended approach as a licensing model — comparing itself to how a chip designer like Intel licenses intellectual property rather than selling directly to every end customer — layered on top of two device tiers (Inc42, 23 March 2025):

No take rate, per-unit margin, or unit economics have been published for either tier. The part outsiders are most likely to get wrong is treating this as a conventional consumer-device company: the company’s own framing is closer to a platform-technology licensor that expects its margin to sit in intellectual property and manufacturing know-how rather than in high-volume direct retail (Inc42, 23 March 2025).

The numbers

Theranautilus is a private company and does not publish a full multi-year profit-and-loss statement. Only one fiscal year of revenue has surfaced in this research, via Inc42’s company database, which draws on regulatory filings; profit or loss has not been disclosed for any year, and no product had commercially launched during the period covered.

Fiscal year Revenue (₹ crore) Profit / (loss) (₹ crore)
FY23 Not publicly disclosed Not publicly disclosed
FY24 Not publicly disclosed Not publicly disclosed
FY25 0.33 (₹33.1 lakh), up 0.15% YoY Not disclosed

Given the company had not completed human clinical trials or a commercial launch as of the most recent sourced reporting, the FY25 revenue figure most plausibly reflects grant income, research services or early licensing activity rather than device sales — a distinction the company has not itself broken out publicly.

Where the money comes from

Theranautilus has not disclosed a revenue split by geography or channel, which is unsurprising for a company that has not yet shipped a commercial product. What can be reconstructed instead is the segmentation embedded in its own roadmap:

The surprise, such as it is, is less about where revenue currently comes from and more about how little of it there is relative to the ambition on record: a company with ₹33.1 lakh in FY25 revenue is simultaneously being described, in its own investor conversations, as aiming to be the first in the world to commercialise a nanorobotic medical device (Inc42, November 2024).

The risks

The takeaway

The instructive part of Theranautilus is not the nanorobotics — it is the sequencing. A technology capable, in principle, of steering particles through blood and living tissue could have been pitched first at cancer drug delivery, the application the founders say they are ultimately working toward. Instead the company spent its first commercial effort on dental hypersensitivity: a problem that is topical rather than systemic, treatable without entering the bloodstream, and cheap enough to fail safely if the first version disappoints a patient. Root-canal disinfection, the more clinically dramatic original result, was pushed behind it. For a founder sitting on a genuinely novel platform technology, the lesson is not to lead with the most impressive application of the science, but with the one that lets regulators, clinicians and patients get comfortable with the idea at the lowest possible stakes — and to treat that first, humbler product as the credibility that later, harder products will be built on (Inc42, 23 March 2025).

Frequently asked questions

What does Theranautilus actually make?

Magnetically guided nanorobots, smaller than 300 nanometres, built from biocompatible materials such as food-grade silica and trace iron. The lead product, CalBots, treats dental hypersensitivity by sealing exposed tubules in worn teeth; a second, earlier line of research targets bacteria left behind after root-canal treatment (Advanced Science, 11 August 2025; Advanced Healthcare Materials, 2022).

Who founded Theranautilus, and when?

Ambarish Ghosh, Peddi Shanmukh Srinivas and Debayan Dasgupta founded the company in 2020, incubated at IISc’s Centre for Nano Science and Engineering, building on nanoparticle-steering research Ghosh had pursued for years before that (IISc, 16 May 2022; Inc42, 23 March 2025).

How much funding has Theranautilus raised?

$1.26 million across two rounds: a $60,300 seed led by IIT Roorkee on 3 January 2023, and a $1.2 million seed led by pi Ventures, with Golden Sparrow Ventures and angel investors, announced in November 2024 (Tracxn, accessed September 2026; Inc42, November 2024; BioSpectrum India, 19 November 2024).

Is the nanorobot device approved for medical use?

Not yet, as of the most recent sourced reporting. The materials used are classified as generally recognised as safe (GRAS) in the United States, and animal trials have reported no toxicity, but the peer-reviewed CalBots study published in August 2025 still describes clinical translation as a future goal rather than a completed or ongoing human trial (Inc42, 23 March 2025; Advanced Science, 11 August 2025).

What is Theranautilus planning next?

Building an ISO-certified manufacturing facility, running human trials on roughly 300 patients, and targeting commercial launch of the hypersensitivity device around 2026, with longer-term ambitions in drug delivery for cancer therapy (Inc42, November 2024; Inc42, 23 March 2025).

Sources

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

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