Cipla, an India-based pharmaceutical sales company, is setting up an international incubator for start-ups. The new division will be called Cipla Ventures and will focus on start-ups specialising in biotechnology, medical devices and other healthcare segments. The size of the deals to be targeted or the full amount of capital to be invested has not been made public.
In an interview with the Economic Times of India, the company’s chief executive officer Subhanu Saxena, who joined last year from Novartis, said that the corporate venturing unit would be run by a separate team from the core business so that the operating business would be kept in order, but also as a team that is ‘able to, with sensible risk, place bets for the future’.
“And out of the five or six bets I place, only two or three need to pay off,” he added according to the news report.
The venture will be led by Chandru Chawla, who will be joined by Samina Vaziralli, one of the senior members of the leadership team of Cipla and the daughter of Cipla’s joint managing director, MK Hamied.
Saxena said of the new venturing unit in an interview, “We can fund it through our cash generation; fund it like a VC to the next master, the team comes with the business case and you decide how you want to move forward.”
Cipla recently started making some international acquisitions and starting operations in new markets, such as in Europe and the US. It recently acquired South Africa-based Cipla Medpro for Rs 2,850 ($472m) crore.