Loopworm

India doesn't have a science problem. It has a "getting science to market" problem. That was the real subject at BioWave 2026 in Bangalore and we at Loopworm were excited to be a part of this dialogue alongside people building India's bio-economy: deep-tech founders, venture investors, and the institutions backing them. The room didn't need convincing that Indian biotech can do hard science. Founders on stage and off it are already proving that: building everything from novel diagnostics to industrial fermentation platforms to next-generation crop technology. The harder conversation was about what happens after the science works: who funds the years it takes to move from a lab result to a commercial-scale facility, and who builds the infrastructure that makes that jump possible at all. A few themes came up in almost every conversation at the event: → Patient capital is scarce, and biology doesn't negotiate on timelines. Early checks are easier to find than the growth capital needed to take a working process to commercial scale. → "Cheaper" isn't the ceiling. India's biotech advantage has long been framed around affordability. The founders in the room are building toward something bigger, i.e. original science solving problems, in public health, agriculture, and industrial bio-manufacturing, that haven't been solved anywhere yet. → Regulation and market access need to be built for global ambition from day one, not retrofitted later. → Translation infrastructure: the unglamorous machinery of scale-up, pilot facilities, manufacturing capacity is as much the bottleneck as capital itself. None of this is abstract for us. Loopworm exists because two institutions decided to bet on infrastructure before the market fully understood why it mattered: Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) gave us a place to build and Omnivore backed us early. Incubators and first-check investors are the translation infrastructure this whole ecosystem is asking for. We're proof that it works. We came away from BioWave with a sharper version of something we already believed: India's bio-economy doesn't need more people convinced the science is possible. It needs more people willing to fund and build the unglamorous middle, the years between "it works in the lab" and "it works at scale." That's the work. We're glad to be doing it alongside a room full of people just as stubborn about it as we are. Omnivore | Nucleate | SOSV | Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) Ankit Alok Bagaria | Abhi Gawri Taslimarif Saiyed, PhD | Mark Kahn | Abhilash Sethi | Ashita Patodia #BioWave2026 #IndianBioeconomy #Biomanufacturing #DeepTech

Seven years. One question. How do we make the global protein supply chain resilient for the future? Nutrition. Vaccines. Diagnostics. Industrial enzymes. All of them are proteins. Most of them are expensive to make, slow to scale, and have fragile supply chains. At Loopworm, we started with the belief that silkworms can change that. We kept our heads down and steadily built the infrastructure to prove it: the world's largest silkworm processing facility supplying silkworm-based animal nutrition worldwide. Now we’re advancing into recombinant proteins for life sciences and biopharma. The next step: sharing how we think. Today we're launching The Loop, our Substack. Want to know the science behind insect biotech, the logic behind our platform choices, the inflection points in global bio-manufacturing, the honest view from inside a deep-tech company at this stage of the journey? Subscribe and join along for the ride! Ankit Alok Bagaria | Abhi Gawri #InsectBiotech #RecombinantProteins #AlternativeProteins #NewSilkRoad #Biomanufacturing #DeepTech

12 scientists. 6 Nobel Prizes. One 3mm fly that gave us a century of biology. We're closing #InsectWeek with Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly. Roughly 75% of genes that cause human disease have a version in this insect. Studying the fly has always been, in some sense, studying ourselves. The record speaks for itself. In 1933, flies showed us that genes sit in fixed positions on chromosomes and mapped out the architecture of heredity itself. In 1946, they proved radiation rewrites DNA, laying the foundation for radiation safety standards we still follow. In 1995, they revealed how a body plans its own parts. In 2004, mapping their sense of smell explained how our noses distinguish one scent from another. In 2011, they showed how the immune system first recognises danger. In 2017, they proved that living things carry an internal clock that tracks time without a sun or a watch. Insects propel science because of very practical reasons: they breed in days, cost little, and share enough of our core genetic machinery to matter deeply. Drosophila made that case for understanding life and genetics. The silkworm is making it now for manufacturing a fundamental building block of life: protein. Centuries of domestication have made silkworms uniform, scalable, and remarkably controllable. Leveraging them as living biofactories to manufacture complex proteins is the basis of our recombinant protein work at Loopworm. We conclude Insect Week with this: the smallest organisms often hold the biggest answers. And we're just getting started. Thanks for following us along. #Drosophila #Genetics #InsectBiotech #Silkworm #RecombinantProteins

What if we told you that roughly 2 billion people around the world eat insects? And in most of the cultures that do, it is considered a delicacy. There’s our homegrown Chaprah or Kai Chutney (red ant chutney) found in Chattisgarh and Odisha, the only insect recipe to have a GI tag. The Jing Leed (crispy fried crickets), a crunchy street food in Thailand. Korean Beondegi / Chinese Cán yǒng / Assamese Polu or Leta / Thai Hon mhai / Japanese Tsukudani, all silkworm based recipes. If you can get over your initial ick, insects might just be what we need. An estimated 1 billion people worldwide are protein deficient, and the FAO projects food production will need to increase 70% by 2050 to meet growing demand. Meanwhile, crickets alone can provide nearly twice the protein vs the same amount of chicken or beef on a dry-weight basis. With 50-75% crude protein, a complete amino acid profile and functional biomolecules, silkworms nutritional benefits not only extends to humans but also animals. Popular animal feed ingredients like silkworms and black soldier fly not only fulfill the protein criteria but also contain biomolecules like lysine, methionine and arginine that aid growth, feed conversion and are friendlier for the planet. Conventional animal feed relies heavily on fishmeal, poultry meal and soymeal, which are linked to overfishing, deforestation and carbon emission. Comparatively, insects require 50–90% less land and produce significantly fewer emissions per kg of protein. A Life Cycle Assessment by PwC India found Loopworm’s own silkworm ingredients are carbon negative, actively removing 2.56 kg of Carbon eq for every kilo of ingredients produced. Can insects be the future of food and feed? It already is... #insectweek #insectbiotech #crickets #redants #silkworm #blacksoldierfly

For over 2,300 years, cochineal has painted the town red. Lipsticks. Blush. Textile dyes. Food colouring. Even the red in Rembrandt and van Dyck's art. If you've used Dior or Chanel, you've likely worn it. If you’ve had a strawberry yoghurt or pink frosting, you’ve likely ingested it as well. Thoroughly domesticated by Mesoamerican peoples, it took centuries to turn the insect’s chemical defense against predators into a color that funded empires. The Aztec, Zapotec and Mixtec peoples believed it held ancestral magic. In Spain, the cochineal was as valuable as its silver exports. They turned it into a state secret and punished smuggling cochineal with death penalty. To art historians, it is one of 3 pigments that differentiated Medieval art from the Renaissance. The insect is still relevant today, even as synthetic colours catch up. 1,800 metric tons of cochineal was produced in 2024 by 50,000+ farmers, mostly in rural Peru. It’s market value is projected to reach ~$78 million by 2032. Notably, it’s the only organic red allowed by the US to be used for eye make-up and notoriously hard to replace. Curious if you're already wearing or eating it? Check the label for: carmine, cochineal extract, crimson lake, Natural Red 4, CI 75470, or E120. The colour Red has signed treaties and started wars. It indicates passion and rage, romance and warning, love and blood. An insect smaller than your fingernail has been quietly supplying it to the world. #InsectWeek #Cochineal #InsectBiotech Ankit Alok Bagaria | Abhi Gawri

“From whence arrived the praying mantis? From outer space, or lost Atlantis?” Ogden Nash never got an answer to his poem, and neither have we, really. The earliest recorded specimen, found in Brazil, is about 110 million years old. Over 2,400 species still walk the earth today. A Vietnamese species was even named after Sir David Attenborough: Titanodula attenboroughi. Rock paintings up to 30,000 years old make the mantis one of the oldest continuously worshipped animal-deities on Earth. Among the San peoples of the Kalahari, IKaggen, the creator of all living things takes its form. In Greek, "mantis" itself means oracle or seer. In the 1600s, watching a mantis fight gave rise to Northern Mantis Kung Fu. In 1973, Marvel built an Avenger around it. Its uncanny camouflage and the female's habit of eating her mate gave pop culture its "femme fatale". And for all that myth, it remains one of nature's most efficient apex predators, striking only what moves, with total precision. In medicine, its egg case has treated kidney and urinary ailments for centuries. In science, its eyes are the only true 3D vision in the insect world and they are now inspiring depth-sensing algorithms for robots and drones. Its one ear, tuned to bat sonar, is taught in engineering classrooms as an early-warning radar system. Worshipped, feared, studied, and still not fully understood. Not bad for an insect the size of your finger. #InsectWeek #Mantis #Biomimicry #InsectBiotech Ankit Alok Bagaria | Abhi Gawri

Meet the silkworm. An insect that depends entirely on humanity for its survival. And yet, few creatures have shaped human history like it. Over 2,000 years ago, silk was as precious as gold. It was demanded as tribute, paid as salaries to soldiers and reserved for royalty. China guarded the secrets of sericulture for nearly three millennia. When silkworms were finally smuggled out, it became one of history's earliest acts of industrial espionage. They built the Silk Road: a 6,400-kilometre network connecting China, India, Central Asia, the Ottoman Empire and Europe. This route didn’t just ferry silk, but also science, literature, religion, art, technology and culture. Silk, beyond its value as textile, is itself a protein fibre containing fibroin and sericin which are now being explored for wound healing, tissue engineering, drug delivery, regenerative medicine, biosensors and advanced medical materials. The Korean beondegi, Japanese tsukudani, Thai hon mhai, the Assamese leta and the Naga eri polu are all silkworm delicacies. In traditional Chinese medicine, silkworms are used to treat hypertension and fatty liver. Silkworms are protein rich and contain essential amino acids, healthy lipids and bioactive compounds with antioxidant, antihypertensive, antibacterial, anticoagulant and antitumor properties. At Loopworm, we are building #theNewSilkRoad, not for silk but for proteins with the same insects. We manufacture silkworm-derived proteins and lipids as nutrition for animals and are transforming silkworms into living bioreactors to produce recombinant proteins, enzymes, antibodies and other high-value biomolecules. The same organism that once powered the world's most valuable trade network is now helping reimagine how we manufacture the medicines and proteins of the future. #InsectWeek #Silkworm #InsectBiotech #InsectProteins Ankit Alok Bagaria | Abhi Gawri

Our connection with honeybees spans over 9,000 years. Neolithic man devoured honey and used beeswax for dental fillings. In 2025, scientists were leveraging bees as bioindicators of plastic pollution. Few creatures have been entrusted with this much, for this long or played such a crucial role in science, cuisine, medicine or culture. An old European custom mandates "telling the bees" about births, deaths, weddings, and major life events as they were considered part of the family. As recently as 2022, the royal beekeeper kept the tradition and informed the bees at Buckingham Palace that the Queen had died. In Egypt, archaeologists found 3,000-year-old honey buried alongside royalty in ancient tombs. In Indian mythology, the Hindu love god Kamadeva's bowstring was made of honeybees, while the deity Krishna was called Madhava, born of honey. Meanwhile, the honey bee’s impact on modern life is impossible to ignore:  1 out of 3 things on your plate is there because of a bee. From apples to almonds to coffee, bees pollinate over 100 crops that built modern agriculture. Without them, ~$300 billion in annual global food production disappears. Long before antibiotics, Egyptian physicians used honey to dress wounds. Modern microbiology backs this remedy, honey is bactericidal against Staphylococcus aureus and E. coli. A honeycomb is a 2,000-year-old math problem, solved by bees which intuitively knew that a hexagon was the most efficient shape for storing most with least. It was finally proven mathematically in 1999. In 1973, Karl von Frisch won the Nobel Prize for decoding the Waggle Dance through which bees give each other GPS coordinates. Today, it has inspired algorithms used in complex computer science, robotics, and logistics routing. Honeybees remind us that sometimes solving the problems of the future begins with paying closer attention to the organisms that have been doing it right under our feet for millenia. Curious to learn more about the honey bee? We’ve curated a list of our favourite content for you to dive into a rabbit hole. See comments below for more. #InsectWeek #Loopworm #Honeybees #InsectBiotech Ankit Alok Bagaria | Abhi Gawri

Whether it is the mosquito you swat away or the bug in your code, insects are considered a nuisance. As an insect biotech start-up, Loopworm is setting out to fix this misconception and give insects the rebrand they deserve. This Insect Week, we’re looking closer at the smallest creatures on Earth doing some big things for humans and the planet. From a silkworm that produces the silk that clothe us to the lac insect whose natural resin is used in food and pharmaceuticals, from the cochineal insect that gave the red tint in a lipstick to the fruit fly that has propelled modern genetics, from a honeybee that is crucial for pollination to a dung beetle that breaks down organic waste, we’re giving these remarkable creatures the recognition they deserve. Follow along as we dig deeper... #insectweek #insectbiotechnology #entomology #biodiversity #sciencecommunication Ankit Alok Bagaria | Abhi Gawri

Fishmeal prices are soaring, so is the global demand for blue food. As climate change brings supply volatility and oceans become more and more vulnerable, the next decade of aquaculture requires thinking outside the box.  Can insect-based feed take a more mainstream role in this journey? Loopworm’s Co-Founder & CEO, Ankit Alok Bagaria will join industry leaders including Brett Glencross, Suzy Black, Kelvin Ng ♻️ as well as Amanda Lim and the AgNavigator team to map the way forward for resilient aquaculture. Join them on July 8, 2026 at 3:00 PM SGT. Registration link in the comments! If you're building or backing the future of sustainable aquafeed and blue food systems, be a part of the conversation on what should change in the next 10 years for aquaculture to thrive. #SustainableAquaculture #AlternativeProteins #FutureofFeed