CrisprBits, a Bengaluru biotech startup, has raised $3 million in a pre-Series A round to scale its CRISPR-based diagnostics and gene-editing platforms, lifting its valuation to $12 million. The company plans to use the money to commercialize its PathCrisp molecular diagnostics line and build an AI-augmented strain engineering platform for industrial biofuels.
The round was led by Spectrum Impact, the family office of Aarti Industries Ltd.’s Chairman and Managing Director Rajendra Gogri, with participation from existing backers including the Vijay Alreja Family Office (VJ Technologies Group) and new investors such as the promoter family of HBL Engineering Ltd. Earlier funding from the founders, VJ Technologies Group and C-CAMP is being deployed to expand manufacturing capacity across human health, food safety and animal health applications.
CrisprBits’ investment is happening at a time when CRISPR moves from lab tool to commercial platform in diagnostics, gene therapies and industrial biotech, drawing sustained interest from strategics and financial investors worldwide. Global CRISPR technology revenues are projected to grow at around 11–16 percent annually this decade, with estimates putting the broader CRISPR market in the $5–23 billion range by 2030–2035 as applications in healthcare, agriculture and biomanufacturing scale up.
“Our focus has always been on attracting patient capital that shares our goal to ‘rewrite biology and reimagine the planet,’ CrisprBits co-founder and CEO Vijay Chandru, said in a press release. “This round gives us the fuel to launch in India and immediately scale to global markets with high-quality, affordable solutions,” he said.
CrisprBits’ PathCrisp platform targets rapid, point-of-need molecular diagnostics, promising sample-to-result times of under 2.5 hours with minimal infrastructure. The product line spans tests for typhoid, antimicrobial resistance, sickle cell disease, foodborne pathogens and on-farm animal disease surveillance, aimed at hospitals, food processors and livestock producers.
Beyond diagnostics, the company’s EdiCrisp platform offers end-to-end gene-editing services using the indigenous enFnCas9 system from the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, positioned as more precise than legacy SpCas9 systems.
A third platform, CurieCrisp, combines patient-derived iPSC lines, CRISPR-corrected controls and AI analytics to support preclinical research and rare disease drug discovery, with an emphasis on improving access in the Global South.
CRISPR stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, referring to a pattern of repeated DNA sequences found in bacteria and archaea – a major group of single-celled microorganisms.
CRISPR-Cas9 is a gene-editing technology that acts like molecular scissors, allowing scientists to cut and modify DNA at specific locations in the genome. The tool was adapted for genome editing in 2012 by researchers including Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, whose work on CRISPR-Cas9 earned them the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and set off a wave of applications in medicine, agriculture and basic research.
Consultancy and market-research estimates suggest that CRISPR-related markets are entering a scale-up phase, particularly in health care. One global forecast pegs the CRISPR technology market at about $3.2 billion in 2025, rising to roughly $5.5 billion by 2030 at an annual growth rate of just over 11 percent, driven by demand for genetic disease therapies, functional genomics tools and next-generation diagnostics.
Within diagnostics, CRISPR-based tests are expected to grow faster than the broader market as they move into point-of-care infectious disease testing and oncology. The CRISPR-based diagnostics segment alone is projected to climb from around $3.8 billion in 2025 to more than $15 billion by 2034, implying a CAGR of about 16–17 percent as new products win regulatory approvals and reimbursement.
India has emerged as an early adopter of CRISPR diagnostics, starting with the FELUDA assay developed by CSIR-IGIB and Tata Group in 2020, which demonstrated the feasibility of low-cost CRISPR-based testing for infectious diseases.
Last week, Union Minister Jitendra Singh launched ‘BIRSA 101’, India’s first indigenous CRISPR-based gene therapy for sickle cell disease, developed at CSIR-IGIB and transferred to the Serum Institute. The therapy aims to make advanced gene-editing cures affordable for Indian patients, particularly tribal populations, supporting the ambition for a Sickle Cell–free India by 2047.
Domestic market forecasts indicate that India’s CRISPR gene detection and diagnostic segment could grow from around $50 million in the mid-2020s to more than $240 million by 2032, with biomedical diagnostics as the largest and fastest-growing application.
Recent initiatives include new CRISPR laboratories in Bengaluru for gene editing and diagnostics, and a pipeline of rare-disease and oncology programmes exploring CRISPR-based interventions. Against this backdrop, CrisprBits — founded by BITS Pilani alumni and operating a 7,300-square-foot CRISPR R&D facility in Bengaluru — aims to extend India’s footprint from diagnostic kits to platforms spanning gene editing and sustainable industrial biotechnology.
With the fresh capital, CrisprBits plans to ramp up manufacturing at its diagnostics facility and expand distribution into Africa and Latin America over the next six months. In parallel, it intends to build an AI-augmented strain engineering platform focused initially on biofuel production, targeting cost and sustainability gains for industrial partners in chemicals and energy.
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