Zobo Biosciences discovers novel bioactive molecules — for hair, skin, wound repair, renal protection and drug-resistant infection. We take a screening method that is eighty years proven, run it on instruments that did not exist when it was abandoned, protect what we find, and license it to the companies that already own manufacturing and distribution.
01 The urgency
Resistance is no longer a forecast problem. It is a present clinical failure, and it is concentrated in exactly the region we operate from.
deaths from antibiotic-resistant infections forecast between 2025 and 2050 — roughly three every minute.
deaths per year directly attributable to AMR by 2050, up around 70% on 2022. 8.22M per year with AMR involved.
growth in reported clinical Candida auris cases in the US, from 1,471 in 2021 to 6,304 in 2024.
The same story is repeating in fungal disease. The WHO published its first Fungal Priority Pathogens List in 2022 — Candida auris, Aspergillus fumigatus, Cryptococcus neoformans — and resistant dermatophytes such as Trichophyton indotineae are now endemic in India, where standard topical azoles are failing in routine practice. The molecules are needed here first.
02 The method
Almost every antibiotic class in clinical use today came from natural-product screening — pulling bioactive compounds out of living material and testing them against real organisms. The industry walked away from it in the 1990s for combinatorial chemistry, which produced enormous libraries and almost no new antibiotic classes. The method was never the problem. The instruments were.
Dereplication was manual and slow — teams kept rediscovering the same known compounds. Structure elucidation took months per candidate. Screening throughput was limited by hand. Nothing about the biology was wrong; the cost of knowing what you had in the flask was simply too high, so the pharmaceutical industry stopped looking.
What replaced it generated millions of synthetic compounds and, over three decades, almost no new antibiotic classes. The drugs that still work in a hospital today are overwhelmingly the ones that came out of the older method, or chemical modifications of them. The field did not run out of natural chemistry. It ran out of patience with the cost of reading it.
Our starting library is not a chemical catalogue. It is twelve food-grade plant sources screened for antimicrobial peptides — small, evolved-to-kill molecules that attack membrane architecture rather than a single enzyme, which is precisely why resistance is slow to develop against them. Two are already characterised: a black pepper nsLTP1 (Pepin-1 homologue, 78% identity to the APD3 reference) and a guava nsLTP2 (83% identity to the UniProt reference), both confirmed by LC-MS/MS. Starting from edible material is a commercial decision as much as a scientific one: it shortens the toxicology conversation and lets a molecule reach a shelf years before it could reach a clinic.
03 The engine
Every gate is a checkpoint that either kills the asset cheaply or raises its price. Nothing reaches a commercial partner before it has passed all of them.
A biological target with a real, unserved clinical or consumer failure behind it.
Source, extract, fractionate. Enrich for the active. Identify what is actually in the fraction.
Mechanism, potency, spectrum, stability and cytotoxicity established in vitro.
Provisional then PCT. Composition, sequence and use claims drafted around the evidence.
Data package taken to ingredient houses, dermatology, pharma and AMR funders.
Upfront, milestones and a running royalty for the life of the patent. No inventory, no CAC.
04 Pipeline
The consumer programs reach revenue in months and pay for the lab. The therapeutic programs take years and carry the asymmetric upside. Running both from one discovery stack is what makes the second affordable.
A proprietary molecule targeting melanocyte biology and follicular pigmentation — catalase activity, oxidative stress and melanin synthesis regulation at the follicle. Positioned as a licensable active with mechanistic evidence behind it, not as a consumer brand.
Licensees: global beauty conglomerates, specialty dermatology, cosmetic ingredient suppliers.
Molecules targeting accelerated tissue repair and regeneration, with an antimicrobial component that addresses the infection burden which stalls most chronic wounds. The peptide chemistry serves both functions from one asset.
Licensees: medtech and pharmaceutical companies with regenerative medicine and tissue-repair portfolios.
Cellular-injury intervention and nephroprotection at the molecular level — an area with almost no approved protective agents and a patient population that only grows. The longest horizon in the portfolio and the largest licensing economics.
Licensees: pharma and biotech focused on nephrology, organ preservation and cellular-injury therapeutics.
Antimicrobial peptides acting on membrane architecture rather than a single enzyme target, screened against ESKAPE pathogens, Candida species including C. auris, and resistant dermatophytes. This is the program the world has already agreed to co-fund through CARB-X, BARDA, INCATE and BIRAC.
Licensees: anti-infective pharma, plus non-dilutive AMR funders as development partners.
05 Value creation
We do not create value by selling product. We create it by moving an asset up this ladder. Each rung removes a category of risk a licensee would otherwise have to price in — which is why the same molecule is worth an order of magnitude more at the top than at the bottom.
06 Licensing economics
These are not projections. They are the shape of disclosed licensing deals across small-molecule and peptide assets — the market's own pricing of an asset at each stage of evidence. One asset can pay across every line at once.
| Asset type | Stage at deal | Upfront | Milestones | Royalty on net sales |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cosmetic / topical active | Safety + efficacy dossier complete | $0.1M – $2M, or direct B2B supply margin | $0.5M – $5M | 2% – 6% |
| Antifungal / antibacterial lead | Preclinical, IP filed | $1M – $30M | $50M – $300M | Low single digit – 10% |
| The same asset, de-risked | Phase I complete | $20M – $150M+ | $300M – $800M+ | High single digit – mid-teens |
06.1 Disclosed comparables
| Deal | Stage | Terms | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solid Biosciences ← FA212 | Preclinical candidate | $1M upfront · up to $34M development + $21M sales milestones · low-single-digit royalties | A single preclinical asset with no clinical data, ~$56M headline. |
| Regeneron ← CytomX | Discovery collaboration | $30M upfront · up to ~$0.8bn milestones · high-single to low-teen royalties | Discovery-stage platform economics — the model we are building toward. |
| Biogen ← Stoke | Clinical-stage | $165M upfront · up to $385M milestones · low-double-digit to high-teen royalties | What the same asset is worth once clinical risk is removed. |
Source: company SEC filings, 2025. Full-year 2025 saw $250.2bn across 516 licensing deals — the most active year on record.
07 Targets
Discovery companies fail on vagueness. These are the specific artefacts that should exist at each checkpoint — and the ones an investor should hold us to.
08 Why us
The peptide library, the extraction protocols and the LC-MS/MS characterisation come from the founder's own doctoral research in microbiology. Not licensed in, not subject to a university's terms.
A screening and characterisation programme that costs millions of dollars in Boston costs a fraction of that here. Our seed round buys years of experiments, not months.
Consumer actives reach revenue in 18–24 months and carry the lab. That means we are never forced to sell a therapeutic asset early because runway ran out.
Antimicrobial discovery is one of the few fields the world funds with grants rather than equity. This round buys eligibility for capital many multiples its size, at zero further dilution.
The founder operates existing revenue-generating businesses, including a D2C skincare brand that acts as a captive first customer and live testing ground for every consumer active.
BIRAC, C-CAMP and the CARB-X Global Accelerator Network's only non-Western accelerator are all in India — and all actively looking for exactly this.
09 The ask
We are raising a seed round to build the discovery lab, generate the screening evidence, and file the first IP. Not to build a brand, not to buy media — every rupee goes into experiments, protection and the data package that a licensee will eventually pay for.