Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Executive Chairperson of Biocon Ltd., started the company in a Bengaluru garage in 1978 with ₹10,000, an idea few understood and a banking system that viewed her as a high-risk borrower. Nearly five decades later, Biocon has grown into a global biopharmaceutical company with total income of ₹17,270 crore in FY26. Yet, Mazumdar-Shaw believes building the next Biocon could be even harder.
Speaking at the launch of the Rupa Rahul Bajaj Scholarship for Women in Engineering, the Biocon founder argued that India’s biggest challenge in biotechnology is no longer talent or scientific capability but access to patient capital.
“We don’t lack the talent. We don’t lack the scientific capabilities. But we do lack the investment,” Mazumdar-Shaw said.
She warned that India risks losing ground in the global biotechnology race despite its scientific strengths.
“When I started in the first decade of this century, we were way ahead of China. Today, China has almost overtaken the US when it comes to biotechnology.”
The problem, she argued, lies in the country’s funding architecture.
“Our capital markets don’t allow pre-revenue companies to list, whereas many other stock exchanges allow it,” she said.
The capital gap
Mazumdar-Shaw’s argument is that India has built the front end of the innovation pipeline — research institutions, scientific talent and start-ups — but not the financial architecture needed to help those ideas scale into globally competitive companies.
According to her, the absence of a public-market pathway for pre-revenue science companies breaks the funding chain. Venture capital investors need a credible exit route, making them reluctant to back long-gestation innovation businesses that lack a pathway to public markets.
“Venture capitalists are not going to invest in these companies because they need an exit,” she said.
The result is a gap between research and commercialisation. While India is producing scientific talent and promising technologies, many companies struggle to attract the long-duration capital needed to scale.
“You need to create a virtuous cycle. Unless you do that and complete the circle, we will not be able to get anywhere close to China.”
For Mazumdar-Shaw, the issue is not simply about increasing research spending. Technology leadership requires more than research labs and scientific talent. It also demands capital, institutions and an ecosystem capable of translating innovation into commercial scale.
The ECIL lesson
The challenge, she argued, extends beyond biotechnology. Mazumdar-Shaw pointed to Electronics Corporation of India Ltd. (ECIL), which existed decades before Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), yet failed to create a globally competitive ecosystem around it.
“We never thought about building a global-scale opportunity that could have global competitiveness,” she said.
The lesson is that scientific capability alone is not enough. Countries that succeed in strategic sectors combine innovation with patient capital, supportive regulation and long-term industrial ecosystems.
China’s biotechnology rise, she suggested, demonstrates how quickly leadership positions can shift when capital, policy and industry align behind innovation.
The funnel effect
The discussion also turned to women in science and technology, an issue Mazumdar-Shaw knows from personal experience.
Returning to India as a trained brewmaster in the 1970s, she found employers unwilling to hire women for manufacturing roles and banks reluctant to finance a young entrepreneur entering an unfamiliar industry.
While opportunities have improved significantly since then, she believes that access to capital remains a major hurdle, particularly for women founders.
“Even today, I feel that young entrepreneurs, especially young women entrepreneurs, have great difficulty accessing capital,” she said.
Mazumdar-Shaw also pointed to what she described as the “funnel effect” in STEM careers, where women often outperform academically but remain underrepresented in leadership positions.
Building the missing bridge
India is making progress through increased research funding, industry-academia collaboration and innovation-focused programmes, Mazumdar-Shaw said. But funding research alone will not be enough
India has already built much of the scientific talent and research base needed to compete globally. What remains unfinished, she argued, is the financial bridge that allows promising ideas to become globally competitive businesses.
Without that bridge, Mazumdar-Shaw warned, the country risks producing world-class science without creating world-scale companies.