PopVax is an Indian full-stack biotech building first-in-class and best-in-class vaccines and cancer immunotherapies using generative AI-powered protein design and relentless empiricism. We design, develop, and manufacture our own RNA medicines end-to-end, because we believe great pharmaceutical science can only flourish in tight feedback loops that iterate rapidly.
Our north star is the Million Lives Mission: our aim to save 1 million lives each year. To that end, we are developing first-in-class vaccines against Hepatitis C, Strep A, and adult pulmonary TB; broadly-protective best-in-class vaccines against COVID-19, influenza, malaria, and HPV; and precision immunotherapies against hard-to-treat solid tumours such as liver cancer and pancreatic cancer. Beyond existing diseases, we are also building rapid-response biosecurity capabilities against engineered de novo pathogens.
Our experimental work and clinical dose production are based at the PopVax RNA Foundry in Hyderabad – our integrated R&D and GMP-capable manufacturing facility, now home to a 100+ person team spanning computational design, experimental science, analytics, process development, quality, and regulatory affairs. Our first program, a broadly-protective open-source COVID-19 vaccine, heads into a Phase I trial in Australia in mid-2026 – the first of 6+ novel vaccines and immunotherapies we intend to advance into human trials over the next few years.
Our work is funded by Vitalik Buterin’s Balvi Fund, the Gates Foundation, the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), Renaissance Philanthropy, and Good Ventures, with individual investments from Enveda founder Viswa Colluru and Tesla self-driving AI pioneer Dhaval Shroff.
We’re building a world-class, R&D-driven RNA biopharmaceutical company right here in India, which is bursting with talent that the incumbents are both misusing and underfunding. We intend to leverage our platform and this latent talent base to produce viable computationally-designed vaccine and therapeutic candidates to prevent or treat life-threatening diseases at a pace heretofore unseen in the history of the pharmaceutical industry, then distribute the ones which work at massive scale across the world, in particular ensuring timely and affordable access in lower-income countries.
Every person at PopVax, regardless of role, is ultimately working toward the same thing: getting better medicines to the people who need them, faster than anyone thought possible. If you want to work somewhere with genuinely high stakes, a steep learning curve, and a shot at changing how the world thinks about what biotech in India can achieve, we’d love to hear from you.
We’re hiring across all our teams – you can take a look at open positions over at popvax.com/jobs.
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Feel free to reach out to us via email (hello [at] popvax [dot] com) or visit our website (popvax.com) for more information.
