Hi, I am Anagha. I read a lot, think very deeply, ask hard questions and try (really hard) to live into the answers. If you sat next to me on a train, we would probably end up chatting about the purpose of life and believe me, those are my favorite kinds of conversations.
I am in my final semester at BITS Goa majoring in chemistry. Contrary to the usual entrepreneur story, I have found a lot of joy in classrooms - there are courses that shaped how I think about the world and my place in it, at a physical (and sometimes a more metaphysical) level.
If you had spoken to me this time last year, I would have told you that in a year’s time I would have landed a PhD position at a top university working on ‘translational biochemistry research’. I was so sure about it.
And then I went in to do my final year thesis (capstone project). While I was working on an interesting research problem around nanocellulose vehicles for therapeutic delivery, I found academia slow paced. I was not intellectually challenged to the extent that I wished to be. I was constantly craving to deep dive into new concepts and build stuff. I also worried about the toxic work culture.
Interestingly this is also when Google cut down on the unlimited workspace storage they offered to universities. This got me wondering about how much data we are producing on a daily basis and if data giants like Google are running out of space to store our data (spoiler alert: the answer is yes). I will explore the theme of storage space in an upcoming article.
Image: The email that jolted me into thinking about data storage
Genesis
This is also when my attention turned towards the fundamental storage unit of life, the DNA - storing so much data over hundreds of generations packed into the miniscule spaces of our cells. What if we could leverage DNA for digital storage?
I still remember the exact moment I had this thought. I was shaking with excitement. I thought I had the idea of a lifetime.
And then a quick google search humbled me. I realized that researchers have been fiddling around with digital data storage in DNA since the 1980s (more on this in upcoming blog posts).
There are two research papers that stretched the boundaries of my imagination on DNA data storage, and nudged me towards wanting to experiment with DNA - the Baccam paper by researchers at the National University of Singapore and the encoding of a digital movie in bacterial genomes by a team at Harvard Wyss Institute.
Then the question naturally came down to why we haven’t been able to get to commercial DNA storage systems yet. The cost of chemical DNA synthesis turns out to be the bottleneck. Even when the cost of synthesis can be covered, DNA storage in vials or canisters (as is commonly conceptualized now) cannot be integrated with existing data processing mechanisms. If we are able to identify a method that reduces the cost of DNA synthesis and engineer synthesize, write, read, edit and store functions on a single platform we can enable biostorage and then subsequently biocompute. This is the core thesis of BioCompute (although BioCompute as an entity was conceptualized much later).
Taking a Leap of Faith
Now that I had a thesis, I took a leap of faith, made a rudimentary presentation and demoed it to P, someone I knew I could trust with a world-changing idea. He asked me a lot of questions and that gave me the impetus to expand the scope of my research. Now that a trusted someone had vetted the idea, I took a bigger leap of faith and applied for the Atomic Fellowship at gradCapital - a $5000 grant for crazy science ideas. I knew the folks at gradCapital well because I had spent a couple of months as a VC associate with them in 2022 and that gave me an added level of confidence to reach out.
Speaking to Abhishek over multiple calls (which I took on the stairs of the library at IISER Bhopal), I began to distil not just the science and the technical challenges. I also began to think more deeply about what I really wanted to do in life after college. I had already put the PhD plan on the backburner, and was figuring out ways to do cutting edge science outside of academia.
During that phase, I went on multiple long journeys and had in-depth conversations with close friends thinking out loud if I should delve into something so exciting and frightening all at once. Each time I spoke about doing experiments with DNA data storage, I felt my muscles flare up with excitement. Ironically there was a strange sense of contentment too in spite (or maybe because of) the uncertainty.
That is when I knew I wanted to work with DNA data storage full time. I got back to Abhishek (at gradCapital) and started having more conversations around the possibility of the $40,000 cheque to kick-start a company, in addition to the Atomic fellowship grant.
I also applied for the Emergent Ventures grant (thanks to Akash Kulgod, who is also building some exciting stuff at Dognosis) to fuel the R&D for a chip that can enable biocompute.
Around the same time, I had a very detailed conversation with my parents (I will write about it in detail sometime) about building a venture-backed company. After the initial hesitation that comes with moonshot ideas and their risks, they got around and now they are my biggest cheerleaders.
BioCompute is Born
The Emergent Ventures grant came through in December 2023 after an interesting conversation with Sruthi who manages EV India. I onboarded my first believer (aka teammate) Shreyas to work with me on microfluidics engineering.
I spent a good four months studying the market for data storage, the potential for DNA to disrupt that market and doing a lot of unit economics preparing for the Investment Committee pitch at gradCapital, with a lot of guidance from Abhishek, which means a lot when you are so early in your journey.
The gradCapital IC happened on 17th January 2024 and that literally changed my life. I felt like a real founder and I am so grateful that the investors on the committee found value in what I am building.
When I was starting out I believed that raising money was the biggest challenge. After raising some funds, I found out that setting up a legal entity to access those funds could be a bigger challenge (super grateful to Commenda for helping out with this). 7 months after the idea was first conceived, I am excited to announce that BioCompute is now officially all set to go!
I am amazed by how much I have read, how many interesting people I have spoken to and consequently how much I have learnt and grown in the process of making this happen. And I can’t wait for the road ahead.
“Three profoundly destabilizing scientific ideas ricochet through the twentieth century, trisecting it into three unequal parts: the atom, the byte, the gene” - Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History
At BioCompute we are building at the intersection of the byte, the gene and the atom enabling a transition towards biomolecule driven computation.
The Sus Ventures Phase
In January, I signed up for the Sustainable Ventures elective at BITS. Spearheaded by the incredible team at Sus Mafia, this is a first-of-its-kind course enabling students to build their climate-tech companies and access funding to go from 0 to 1.
It is during this course that I met Amit, a student at BITS Hyderabad who had started thinking about DNA storage through an unconventional path - from the idea of taxation, and how data around taxation is stored and managed. While also parallelly wondering about the nature of intergenerational data transmission (the oral histories as well as biological information), he stumbled on the DNA Data Storage Alliance and got really excited about the revolutionizing potential of the idea. Before I met him he had spent a lot of time reaching out to researchers in space, trying to identify opportunities to work with them.
I loved his enthusiasm, and his willingness to go all into BioCompute during the last year of his university (which is not what typical engineering students do). Amit and I have decided to spend the next 6 months (or more) working together to identify if we are a good fit as co-founders.
The Sus Mafia team has been instrumental in enabling me to reach out to folks in the biotech space. That is how I met CRISPRBITS, India’s leading CRISPR research company. I love how excited they were from the first time they read my one-pager, believing in the revolutionary potential of BioCompute. I am super excited to be collaborating with them on our R&D front.
What’s Next?
I finish at BITS in May, and then move out to the Center for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (cCAMP) in June where I have rented out a lab bench to kick-start experiments, which also involves getting my hands dirty learning how CRISPR works and how we can use it to edit genomes.
We are super excited to talk to folks in the biotech and data storage space - researchers, founders, investors, decision makers and get the ball rolling.
And if BioCompute excites you, let’s catch up and talk - maybe we will find a way to work together. We are at the intersection of microfluidics, micro and molecular biology, material science, chemistry, enzymology, electronics, bioinformatics, computer science and more so there is room for your diverse background and interests, whatever it may be.
