Theia Ventures Leads Pre-Seed Investment in Bio-AI Startup Lemnisca

Theia Ventures has led a pre-seed round in Lemnisca, a Bio-AI company developing intelligent systems to scale biomanufacturing. PointOne Capital and Dr. Satakarni Makkapati also participated in the round. The funding will support Lemnisca’s Bengaluru lab, AI platform development, and early pilots aimed at advancing sustainable bioproduction.

Lemnisca is building an AI companion for fermentation to help manufacturers scale bioprocesses with greater predictability and efficiency. As industries move toward renewable feedstocks and biological alternatives to petrochemicals, the ability to scale biomanufacturing reliably has become a key requirement. While AI has accelerated molecule discovery, scaling these innovations from lab to industrial production remains a complex challenge.

Lemnisca’s platform combines wet-lab experimentation with dry-lab modelling to understand process biology and guide real-time decisions. The system continuously learns from data, enabling more efficient and reliable biomanufacturing.

The company will initially work with fermentation-led manufacturers already progressing along their biomanufacturing journey, while also developing its internal product pipeline. Its targets include reducing development timelines by up to 50% and improving operating efficiency by nearly 25%. Lemnisca is also enabling manufacturers to adopt renewable and waste-carbon feedstocks more quickly through early validation and scalable rollouts.

The startup is inviting pilot collaborations and strategic partnerships across CDMOs, OEMs/SIs, and global ingredient companies.

Priya Shah, Partner, Theia Ventures, said the investment aligns with the firm’s focus on technologies that support sustainable industrial production.
“We are delighted to be early partners in Lemnisca’s journey, where we firmly believe that biomanufacturing in today's era needs advanced digital simulators that predict how microbial processes will perform before reaching large industrial scale,” she said.

Pushkar Pendse, co-founder & CEO of Lemnisca, said the team's goal is to reshape how biology transitions to industrial use.
“From day one, our question was simple: how do we make biomanufacturing the default manufacturing mode globally?” he said. “Our focus is to build the digital operating system that brings biology from lab to factory, making scale-up faster, smarter, and globally accessible.”

Shilpa Nargund, co-founder & CTO of Lemnisca, added that the company is rethinking workflows and model architectures to reduce unpredictability during scale-up.
“The goal is fewer surprises at scale and faster, repeatable success,” she said.

This is Theia Ventures’ third investment from its new fund, which recently announced its first close anchored by British International Investment. The fund has also invested in Sarla Aviation and Climitra Carbon and has committed to three additional investments this financial year.

How does this impact the bioeconomy?

With demand rising for renewable materials, alternative proteins, and low-carbon chemicals, scalable biomanufacturing remains one of the sector’s biggest bottlenecks. Lemnisca’s approach – blending lab-based experimentation with AI-driven simulation – signals a shift toward digital biomanufacturing, where scale-up can be predicted before large industrial deployment.

Industry leaders are increasingly betting on such Bio-AI systems to reduce uncertainty, accelerate time-to-market, and bring biological processes closer to cost-competitive industrial production