The Indian CEO driving change

(upbeat music) - Hey guys and girls, welcome back to Monarchial to Market where we go inside the outsourcing space of former services and former tools covering every stage of the global drug development and commercialization lifecycle. I'm your host, Roman, Segal, and today's episode I'll be speaking with Ankit Gopte, who is CEO at Tenchi Kaizen. Ankit is someone I've known for a long time and is a genuine pleasure to have him on the podcast he's such a lovely guy. And it's been a genuine pleasure to see his development in the industry in the last 10 years, I know, since I've known him. Bit of background on my guest here is a seasoned finance and strategy leader with 15 years of experience in farmer and biotech. At Tenchi, he leads the development and global expansion of innovative farmer tech platforms, including the flag ship Instapil, which we'll get into today. And he also serves as the Chief Corporate Strategy and Development Officer across all group entities promoted by the founders. Ankit is known for his expertise in corporate strategy, growth acceleration, business transformation in his prior role as VP for Strategy and Corporate Development at Glendon's Drives Group. He paid a pivotal role in long range planning, financial forecasting as strategic initiatives. He brings a deep experience in both organic and inorganic growth, asset optimization and risk management and is a gold medalist in MBA finance. Ankit also holds global certifications in corporate finance, E, valuations business leadership and strategy bringing a rare blend of financial position and strategic foresight to the group's leadership. So as you can see, it's very, very accomplished guest and it's interesting to read him his bio there. He sounds very kind of MBA corporate-y and yeah, he doesn't come across like that at all, which is testament to what a great grounded guy he is. Thanks to you, listener, for listening. If you like today's podcast, please give us a like and share and recommend the podcast to someone else. Enjoy. This episode is brought to you by Borat Pharmaceuticals. I've got a real soft spot for Borat. I first met Bobby Scheng, CEO back in 2017 and it's been amazing to watch the business grow and expand to become truly top tier global CDMO. Bobby was in fact one of our first ever guests on molecule to market. A great, great guy. Borat now supports many of the biggest pharmac companies across the globe. Borat has become known as the CDMO that brings a genuine partnership to clients. Shown through their shared risk promise, their white glove service and their PLS on time, infall delivery record. If you want to feel more confident about your CDMO and I suggest you head to boratstidiummo.com. And get my friend welcome to molecule to market. Thank you, Remann. Good to be here. It's been pretty long since I know you and I'm happy to be here on the podcast. I've been reading, hearing a lot on this particular platform and I'm happy to be part of it today. It's absolutely my pleasure. And you also say my name like an Indian person, which is fun. So Remann has ended up being as my listeners. Well, no, we'll be by kind of persona in work. But Remann, as you say, it is the kind of, origin correct pronunciation to thank you. And that's fun that we get to, we get some on you and say my name correctly, including myself on today's podcast. And Anke, you and I have known each other for a long time and it's been a genuine pleasure to get to know you and watch your journey. And I think it was a couple years ago where so you'd become a CEO of Tenshi, which we'll get on to later in the call. And I would love you just to talk about your backstory, like how you got into the sector in your kind of, the big roles that you've done since then, just to give our listener a bit of a sense of the different types of roles that you've done, the different types of businesses that you've worked for within the industry. Yeah, great. So, I mean, I generally credit the global financial crisis of 2008 to be in the farmer's base and there is a history to it. So I was supposed to complete my MBA in 2010, but then we had these lemon brother crisis in 2008 that led to a lot of issues with the campus recruitments that we were hoping to have. The initial plan was to be on the bulge bracket from side of it, do a little bit of a consulting, probably do investment banking, get into all those fancy professions, but what happened in 2010 is not many companies actually turned up in the campus to higher. There was only one company which came for the campus, hiding, in fact, they came for hiring for masters in pharmacy, but I was in the placement committee. I happened to speak to some of the people there and they kind of liked my profile, like my work, and out of nowhere, I ended up receiving an offer from this company. It was a small company based in Chandigarh, the northern side of India. So that's how I entered the farmer's base. So, I'll obviously get into probably a little bit of more detail of it, but I call my foreign to farmer very accidental. Added to the global financial crisis because the major was in finance, so the aspiration was to get into probably something like a said on investment banking or consulting or any big four kind of a setup. - Yeah, I'm smiling because I was very similar to myself, but in two respects, one, I accidentally fell into this sector over 20 years ago just because the first marketing agency, I ever worked with that my first ever client was a CDMO. That's how I ended up learning about this sector. And likewise, the first business I started in remarketing was in 2009. It was in the midst of the global crisis. And so the opportunities come from anywhere at any time. So talk to us about where your career goes from there. So obviously you start in, you know, suppose there's a business graduating, you make your way into your first role in Chandigarh, in India, which is I was actually there, well, not necessarily there, but very close recently as well. It's a nice part of the world that has been hugely developed in the last 10 years or so. - Yes. - So it's been one of the most developed cities in the northern part of India. I think generally people call it the only planned city of India the way it was done. So it was done into and by an architect. And every sector, every place of the city was a very well planned. So this company, so I just to give a recap of how Chandigarh became let's say a hub of pharmaceutical industry. There is a place called Badi in Himachal Pradesh, wherein there was a tax holiday sort of announced by the government. And as it is, a lot of active pharmaceutical ingredients, the salt making companies started getting in and around that belt. And which is where this company also happened to exist, the name of the company was Parabolic Drugs. It started off as a contract manufacturing supplier or a partner to Renbexie now with his auntama. I like I said, I happened to get picked from the campus. The first job I was given was as a management trainee in investor relations and corporate strategy. Probably that was the only role which was coined for someone who was passing out from a business school. So got involved into the management information systems, get to know business, get to know costing, get to do a lot of management accounting and financial accounting, vacancy relations. But in hindsight, I created a lot of my industry knowledge to this particular role because the organization was so open that I had the option to wear multiple hats. So while I was hired for investor relations and corporate strategy, I probably ended up doing a lot of stuff. So I think I would credit a lot of my foundation to this company, unfortunate for the company and probably fortunate for me at the company at some point in time started failing on the financials and it had to go through a corporate debt-reestructuring exercise. But for me, it turned out to be an opportunity because I got to know the industry and sector even more in that process. But basically for financial reasons, I had to then in 2013 move out. But like I said, I can easily confidently say today that most of my learning on the industry and business happened there. Yeah. Right place at the right time. And then where do you go from here? Because I believe you kind of moved on to another part of the industry before joining Strides a few years there, which we'll get to. So the kind of next five years or so kind of took you more into the manufacturing space from my understanding. Yeah. So what happened is like I said, the Berghof consulting stayed with me even after getting into a farmer. So while right after a farmer, I got into automobile industry for about two years. Got a hang of this industry works. Very short-strand. But I think-- the the planned experience and the experience of doing a lot of let's say improvement processes at the facility doing continuous improvements making improvements on the productivity and the efficiency and all that basically the core engineering tactics actually actually we learned in this particular time. So this was between 2013 and 2015 post that I got into consulting and I moved to Mumbai and I can also say that Mumbai is where I got the hang of let's say getting into very large farmer companies who turned out to be our clients and we are striped for one of the clients. This company initially was called Christians and now it is part of EY but this company genuinely and literally gave me the platform of let's say flying high with the larger and bigger companies both in India and overseas. So you're good and you're and it was a consulting role wasn't it? I wasn't sure I knew it was part of EY now but my guess was it was more on the consulting side and you kind of exposed you to as opposed to a range of businesses in in the kind of farmer space. That's right so I was actually part of the code team which was servicing the farmer and manufacturing industries in this company and that's where I learnt a lot of value chain driven businesses within farmer whether it was an active ingredient company or a formulation company or a contract research organization or a contract development organization the biologic side of it the small molecule side of it the peptide side of it I think those three years were very precious and as they say in the cell thing that every client of yours is a new role and then you responsibility for use so you are learning much more than what you would ever learn in a single company. You obviously made a good impression because I did notice you're in the clients that you were with stride down by your car by a car were named in the clients that you represented and you ended up going to work for both companies so clearly you made an impression on your on your clients. Absolutely and I keep telling and joking with people that the only interview I gave was in 2010 and luckily fortunately everything after that happened very organically so I either got to know people or had worked very closely with them to make a natural move whether it was with strides or with bio core like you said and in between I also happened to work with a very large injectable manufacturing company. Which again was like I said accidentally because I happened to work with them on a few business deals and we happened to exchange thoughts and we figured out that there could be a way to work together in that organization. But you're right I mean most of the progression from my first job has been an outcome of the work I delivered or probably the kind of engagements I had with either the clients or let's say the business partners. We are proudly supported by Charles River, your partner in accelerating the path from concept to cure because every moment matters. Making the right choices early in manufacturing and testing can be the difference between delay and delivery. With a seamless continuum of R&D, biologics testing and end-of-end manufacturing from antibodies to cell and gene therapies, Charles River helped you move confidently towards market approval. Discover how it integrated approach speeds development, reduces risk and brings your therapy to patients faster. Look online for Charles River's CDMO solutions. Yeah, it is interesting in the sense that I know if you are a service provider whether it be consulting pricing, marketing, recruitment, anything, if you are exposed to a number of clients in a particular sector, it's a very very steep book with learning curve to understand the nuance of the sector, the nuance of the value chain. And so it sounds that kind of time that Christians have allowed you to do that and actually expose you to different parts of the industry that you then obviously chose to move on to strides. If I understand correctly, you've spent the next, your big chunk of your career since then with strides. You've obviously bounced a bit to a couple of other roles outside of strides, but I think that's maybe focus. I mean, love to cover some of the other roles before we get to Tentchy, but what has it been about strides and maybe give our listener a sense of that business? They have a few brands and strides is a big company which is often well represented at CPHI, for example, but you know, you've spent a long time with that business alone and you might have to experience Tentchy part of strides as well and you have to just clarify that if I've misunderstood that. I think that's a very fair question. So see, strides is in itself an ecosystem of the companies. The group is called strides as a group because it's run by a common founder who started strides and eventually he turned out to be a serial businessman investing into different companies. Within the ecosystem, we had investments in animal health, we had investments in women's health. There were businesses running on the sterile injectable side, the complex platforms. And she happened to be one such platform as well and I'll quickly come to it. I'll probably come to it at a later time, but the whole idea of getting into strides was that it sort of ran in a way wherein the group was sort of segregated across different platforms and each platform gave you an opportunity to look at one value chain of industry, whether it was to do with the formulations on the small molecule side, the same group had investments in biologics. So I happened to also sort of straddle through biologics space. Then like I said, we were building a lot of injectable businesses happen to do that. So well, my payroll continued to be strides and like you said, for the longest period of time, but the opportunities I continued to get and I caught there was to move across different rules and businesses and the platforms within the ecosystem. So I generally call strides while it's an organization, it's a commercial business entity, but in my view, it's a whole lot of an ecosystem of multiple businesses sitting in a single platform. And remind me, it's Aaron Housenit-Issanum escapes me who's the founder of strides. And as you mentioned, like a very, very serial entrepreneur that's built an incredible kind of ecosystem with with strides. And you, so talk to us then about the roles that you did at strides and then maybe just take us to where you are today and get attention and how that came about. And are you all the middle of becoming CEO of the business as well? Yeah. So when I joined strides in 2018, so I knew the company as a consultant from 2015 when I moved into Christensen in Mumbai, but 2018 is when I decided that I should be joining this group full-time. I was spending a lot of time working on multiple strategic programs. And like I said, in 2018, I decided to jump and move from Mumbai to Bangalore. And started off looking at investment programs as a project manager. So it was about looking at all the pharmaceutical investments that Aaron and his family office had across platforms. So that time, the only two listed companies in the platform were strides and a sequence scientific which was into animal health, which we later decided to divest to a private equity. But on the private side, there were a lot of businesses, largely focused across four different domains, the complex injectable site, the biologic site, the third was platform technology which turned out to be 10-C in years. And the fourth was women's health. And I think you and I also connected on women's health where in we were a lot of word support and you were pretty good with the insights you gave us on the business. So coming back to strides 2018 started getting handle of all these companies understood what strategies and Aaron obviously involved being to multiple direct initiatives what we were doing to achieve the strategy and financial outcomes. So that gave me a lot of learning related to businesses the day to the operations, the financial side of it. And also as to when the time is right to make large strategic transactions. And in my tenured strides, the first trainings while having exceeded a couple of times had the opportunity to work on multiple transactions. I elected the third platform within the ecosystem was platform technologies which that time I did not know that at some point in time I would be running that platform. But given the fact that I was so deeply involved into the business, I think the time was right at least I felt so and certainly added to our own part sort of giving me this opportunity that he felt that the time might be right for me to now start drumming this company and doing. Yeah, I'm more a great testament to your hard work and focused to be chosen if you like by or if you look after the tenured business. And obviously there are different strands of the business that you've mentioned there did was essentially the one in terms of the technology that we'll get into. Was that the one that intrigued you the most? For example, or were you happy to go and run any of his business? No, I think a very density in my view was the most standing out business. And when I see so it's because it's the only company in the world besides the market leader which has been able to demonstrate what kind of a capability. It was a lot proprietary and I felt that this is the business wherein there is immense potential for you one to make an impact. Second is to also demonstrate as to how the business can be grown from where we are today to where it can be. I think all other pieces also are equally exciting but they were more or less steady and they needed more of the execution focus. And I think this first of business wherein you had the ability to be more creative and do things which you could do a lot independently with with no playbook kind of a situation wherein you had to follow a certain template on growth. So it very start up kind very similar to the way I operate. So I felt this is what the company this is the company wherein I should actually be spending my time. So you love the kind of the challenge of almost being like a star up in that kind of leads us nicely into talking about Tenshi Kaizan and obviously the insta-pill technology. So for a less than a give us a sense of what you guys do at Tenshi also Kaizan is one of my favorite kind of business phrases and it's something I think a lot of us can I suppose adopt in our own life in terms of your continuous improvement and being better absolutely love it as a term. So I love you to talk about the name of Tenshi Kaizan but also the different technologies in the particular insta-pill which I believe has become a kind of a real success story within your kind of portfolio of technologies. Absolutely. So Tenshi Kaizan as you rightly pointed out was is all about the continuous improvements and in our DNA we believe these improvements are for the health here and the ecosystem we are trying to build. So the name was coined in a way that this company will house a lot of platform technologies which are very unique to the world probably the first in class or either in terms of what they do as a platform. Not the first in class in the way they turn out products. So the whole idea was to build a strong business around the speciality side of the pharmaceutical space so either do a lot of five or five beat ooze or super generics or get into the place wherein the technology could actually make the life easy either for the patients or for the health care providers. So insta-pill the name is basically a combination of two words it's a compound insta means instant and pill obviously the tablet. What we do in insta-pill is it's an oral lyophilized tablet which can be consumed in the mouth without taking water. The disintegration time is very fast you can go as fast as five seconds, seven seconds, ten seconds I think that's the claim being make and the platform basically is very different than the conventional oral disintegrating tablets which are loosely compressed and have their own challenges it's based on the lyophilization technique. It is where we felt we have a strong expertise and we tried using that to our advantage and build in insta-pill which turned out to be proprietary. So today as we speak insta-pill does two kinds of businesses one is a B2B business wherein we have developed certain products which can be sort of out license we don't do anything in terms of marketing our products or not we feel that the products are better suited and designed in a way that a market leader actually takes them to the consumers. The in part of the business is the CDMO Lake wherein the ideation of the product also comes from the partner and we just happen to support them on the development and the scale up and then eventually the commercialization of the product. You're listening to Molecule to Market where we go inside the outsourcing space of the Global Drug Development sector. The podcast for professionals working in the pharma and biotech contract services space. I was just about asking you your clients then my assumption would have been that they are a combination of CDMOs and then other big pharma companies that want to take their product and utilize your technology for all the kind of fast acting, convenient medical benefits that you had just mentioned. Is that a correct assumption? Yes. So the way it works for us is if it is a big pharma company we would ideally be discussing with them a life cycle management situation wherein they already have a blind, they have a brand which is on a traditional dosage format and we would be pitching them the idea of moving that Molecule or product into this new dosage format which is both let's say convenient and also better suited for the conditions of the product. It also gives them a support if a brand is sort of going through a phase wherein a lot of generic competition is coming so that's the big pharma side of it. Then what we also do is we we have realized that this particular platform given the nature it has is best suited in applications on the pain management or let's say on the anti-psychotic side of it, a allergy side of it and any such therapeutic category wherein the onset has to be faster and this is where I think most of our science in R&D focus also comes wherein we do certain developments and speak to the partners saying that okay we have done something on these lines, would this be of interest to you over time and typically if it is US it goes through a 505B two-root because it's a very unique product, won't have a reference drug on the market already. If there is a reference product because we have a very large company which does this technology in a different way, we believe we have probably a slight competitive advantage on them but that's one way of doing business with them. The thirdly pointed out is CDMO which is something we started two years back when we had our massive capacity coming over. Where and we've been meeting and discussing with large pharma, big pharma and the small companies including the virtual pharma companies to see if they have a product idea and that's very well into this orally disintegrating lyophilized lead platoom of medication. Very cool and I was going to ask you to answer my question on the 505, is that an area where my assumption would be that this is very well used by your repurposing old drug products and breathing life into them and giving them something else which I think is so relevant for your technology. Give us a sense of size and scale of the business. Obviously you mentioned that you'd invested in your own facility and technology. What does the team look like? What does the facility look like? In other words, for many of our listeners that work across the industry, what point should they be picking up the phone and bringing in an unkits to have a conversation. So valid ask in terms of knowing where we are today. So we started off as a very small R&D setup based in India. We had less than 10 million units of capacity to do it. The whole idea was that we do small scale development in India and have the manufacturing done in the US at some point in time. This was until the COVID had not hit us and the plan was to set up a site in US with close to 200 million units of capacity. We have a bridge of doing the development in India and then taking the scale up in the US. Post COVID we realized one multiple things happened in the way the business was happening and we felt that most of our partners actually are pretty okay with the site being closer to the R&D center and we decided instead of US we rather have the manufacturing setup in India itself. And today as we speak we have 270 million units of capacity in India and the unique advantage we have is of this 270 million 200 million unit capacity is absolutely fully automated. You need less than three people to run that factory because end to end starting from the filling of the compound to finally ceiling and having that packed everything is automated in a very integrated kind of a line. I wish I could also put the video here wherein the people can see how much it happens. I think that's the unique advantage we have so if you really see we have close to 200 people off which 100 people are sort of deployed on the previous facility with a small and less or I would say semi automated. and then we have a lot of people on the quality and the R&D side of it, but this new facility, which we commercialized last year and it got FDA approval in November 2024. This is fully automated and like I said, less than three people can run this facility and do it. - That's very good. And you're, I'm interested in known as the Businesses Scaled. I'm okay, you know, you said before, what excited you about the opportunity, the attention was this kind of almost start up an opportunity to explore a lot to technology paths and obviously in Stipel as the one that seems to be really gaining traction in the market for many of the reasons you've just, what's been the biggest learning go for you? Right, like in terms of this being your baby, this is your first CEO gig. What has been harder than you imagined or your biggest learning that you can maybe share with our listener? - Yeah, so what happened is between 2017 and 2020, a lot of our time and effort actually went into doing the R&D side of it. We were focusing on doing a lot of molecules on our own. And that's where we realized that the modally, while scientifically is very exciting, was not commercially making a lot of sense because as you would know, being in the industry, doing a five or five B to kind of a route, sometimes it's financially draining on you and at the same time, it takes a lot of time before the product is on the market. So it is when we had this new manufacturing setup, we also pivoted our business to a CDMO model and we realized that you don't have to do everything end to end starting from the ideation to the commercialization. If you are could be manufacturing end the science side of it, you'd rather focus on that and let somebody else do the portfolio optimization for you. And I think that forced the turning point for us and just to give you a cue. The first product went commercial for us in 2021 and until 2023, we only had two products on the market. But ever since we have gotten to this CDMO model and ever since the FD approval came last year, I think our funnel is turning out to be very good on the CDMO opportunities we have, I think as we speak, we are dealing with at least 30 partners or 30 programs across multiple jurisdictions with US, Europe, Australia and a lot of other Asian Pacific countries actually doing business with us. So I think for me, the turning point of this business to become, let's say, a growth business from an incubation business was pivoting into the CDMO model. And when I say CDMO, it's not because it's something which is very fancy to say. I think it's more because we felt that we had better suited serving the partners onto fulfilling their needs rather than just focusing on science and doing products which may or may not be needed in the market. So I think I might have probably digressed on the full question you had, but that in my view was the turning point of the company. And to me, it also turned out to be an exciting phase because now it's more about getting that funnel from 30 to probably 300, taking this capacity from 270 to probably 1 billion. And I think that the growth is actually going to accelerate. That's good. That's very positive. And talking about growth acceleration, I want to spend five, seven minutes talking about the location of the business, obviously being in India, your exposure to the market in the last 15 years or so. For many of our listeners, we, in the Western world in particular, we're all aware of the role in the plays in the industry. But given the kind of heightened geopolitical situation and your tariff wars between various countries, love your perspective on where you think India fits within that conversation. We had the Paramount CEO on recently Peter who talked very well, mostly about the role and position India has in the industry, but also just broader. I think he talked about this was India's century. What's your view on the potential in India for growth in the sector in the next? Call it 10 to maybe five to 10 years, and particularly now with the kind of trade tensions as well. Appreciate that. I've done very, very broad question. But you have such an interesting and eclectic mix of experience in the sector. You obviously wrote a business out in the video at the minute as well. Just to give all listener a real sense of what it feels like being on the inside. I think it's a very interesting situation and also the position to be in India as a country. And India, as let's say the industry for farmer has done well for years. Of what was happening is that I generally break CDMO as CDO and CMO. And I think India was always doing very well on the CMO side of it. And that's where I felt with tariffs, without tariffs, India clearly had a competitive advantage. If not on the APS side of it because of scale. When the formulation development, the formulation, commercialization, it always had an edge over all other countries which were competing in this space. But what has happened is last several years, India has moved up the leaders in the CDMO's group or moved up the game on the CDO side of it as well. And you can credit companies to make that mark. And I think there has been a void wherein the large CDMOs globally have been unable to service. Let's say a lot of smaller companies. And there are also let's say attention deficits when it comes to servicing certain programs, which do not beat the financial threshold of these large-zCMO programs. And I think personally speaking, based on my experience and whatever I have seen in the industry, that's the kind of void India has been able to feed. India, given the nature of operations, given the way people operate, has always been more flexible with the contracting side of it, more flexible with, but let's say more available with the program management side of it, I think has picked that space very well. And certainly amongst the global leaders or even the smaller companies, it has created that space for itself, wherein the countries in the companies are now looking forward to also look at RFQs from India. And gone are the, wherein the RFQs were only for the cost reasons, these days it's cost plus a lot of sustainability aspect. And I think India is scoring very well on that piece. wherein the partners have that confidence that if you happen to give, business to a very reputable Indian company, at least on the supply chain security on the compliance side of it, and even on the project delivery, they would be very on spot. So, you have interesting times. And to you point on trade situation in the tariffs, clearly there is a lot of noise on that, but as we've been analyzing, I think, from April to or April three, when these were announced to where we are today, I think we are already two months down the line on that, I don't think the business has largely been impacted. In fact, the noise has also settled. I know there is that 90 day of a window when the tariffs situation will not be revisited, but I still feel that the companies have been able to decide and discuss with their partners, that even without tariffs, the NIN ecosystem is going to flourish. - I'm so interested in what a great perspective on, I was really well, I took from what you took mentioned there is that sense of India now, really being quite silly, that the D of CDMO as well as the M, like you said, it's long been known as a real farmer manufacturing hub, but on the development side, the things, I think probably the educational system, the talent, obviously the population of talent as well in India is giving it a real advantage in the market at the minute. From a geographic perspective, you mentioned right at the start of the call, we talked about Chandigarh and the north of India. Do you, are there particular parts of India, for example, like clusters in India, that seem to be particularly thriving in the sector? In the same way, if I look at the US in farmer, biotech in farmer, obviously Boston, Cambridge, San Diego, San Francisco, etc. Other specific parts of India that are being known for either being clusters from a biotech or form a perspective or indeed from a manufacturing perspective as well. - Yeah, so I think that's an interesting thing, even from an India standpoint, certainly there are clusters, let's say the southern cluster with Hyderabad and Bangalore and probably parts with Mumbai, which would be in the Bahadin Gujarat, which has taken a lead on what the farmer and biofarm as an ecosystem should do. And there has been a lot of government's support for these areas to be even further developed in terms of the power centers of the skills and talent, which is available. However, the unique situation in India is that each of the geography Let's go. say each of the direction within India has something special to offer. So if you look at the Northern belt of India, it is very strong with the domestic delivery of medications. So the big shots, the big branded generic companies are actually based there in the Northern side. If you look at the eastern side of India, there are a lot of companies which are sort of based there for maybe optimizing the tax, but as a result of the same the ecosystem on the sick him and the eastern side of India has become very strong. And when you look at the western side of India predominantly Kuzra, they've been very effective CDM, not CDM was very effective CMOS for the European and rest of the world markets. And obviously when you look at South, I think I would say they are the flag bearers when it comes to the talent on the biofarm or even the small molecule development and research side of it. But clearly if you look at India in a very holistic way, I think all the four corners are sort of doing their job in the way they shoot. And they have been very efficient in what they would like to deliver as an ecosystem. Lens for that, I think it's super helpful for you to paint that picture for us. I mean I'm kind of learning as you're you're talking about it and it should say for all of our listeners as well. And final question, and Kate is I suppose about ambition for a Tenshi and you know probably not just in support, but for Tenshi guys in in terms of you guys have grown very quickly your technology is being very well adopted as we've talked about, you know, what is your ambition for the business in terms of its global presence in terms of its technology being utilized in different markets. As you mentioned, you have a a backer that is very entrepreneurial and very ambitious himself, but I love you just to talk about like for you personally as well, like how how far do you think this company can go and what's your vision for the business? Absolutely. See when we started Tenshi as a company in the whole idea was to look at the convenience and like I said the thought faster on set side of the business, but over time you have also realized that you're solving a very serious global problem with this the increasing load of the geriatric population. I think the Western world, the Eastern world has quite a significant population with this scathing up with each and I think that's where insta-pill comes very handy because you have people who are not necessarily supported with a lot of resources to to have a patient compliance, to have a medical compliance, to also be independent when it comes to dosing. So so far what we have done today is everything that a generic business or let's say a branded generic business should do, but I think we have realized that we can go or and beyond looking at these two categories. One is the geriatric population which I talked about and also the pediatric population basically the newborns and the spaces wherein there is a need for a pill which goes without water which has a higher compliance and stuff like that. So I think our focus now is clearly to move away from the generic sides to actually focus on these new chemical entities as to what we can do in terms of making that difference. I think what also I trying to do is to also look at some of the conventional dosage formats which are very difficult to administer and make them move to the insta-pill. The technology supports it obviously we need to do a lot of research and work around it, but there are possibilities to make it bigger than just focusing on let's say the life cycle extension side of it. So personally for me we can as to take this business. I wouldn't put a number because we think sky is the limit when it comes to that but I think looking at the real world problems of getting into NCEs, getting into biological entities, looking at the animal health case, animal health use and doing probably a vaccine kind of use. I think all those things would be very helpful in taking this business towards the real use case of making a difference in the lives of people. Well it's a great success story today Ankit and I love the ambition and vision and no ceiling for what you're trying to achieve not only as a business but for patient outcomes as well as you just mentioned. Ankit you know I consider you a good friend and it's been a genuine honor to have you on the podcast and share your story things I didn't know about you actually which you've come to like today which has been enlightening for me and thank you so much for being a guest on molecule to market. No thanks I should be saying thanks Raman for having me here and we know for quite some we know each other for quite some time but I never felt that we should I never realize that we'll be having this conversation at some point in time but happy to be here and happy to chat with you on these matters. Like I said my closing comment would be that India is coming in a big way when it comes to the scientific outcome then I think this is the time when we would actually shape up the world in a much better situation. I first met Bobby Scheng and CEO back in 2017 and it's been amazing to watch the business grow and expand to become truly top tier global CDMO. Bobby was in fact one of our first ever guests on molecule to market a great great guy. I've shown through their shared risk promise, their white glove service and their peelest on time, info delivery record. If you want to feel more confident about your CDMO then I suggest you head to boratstidiummo.com. We are proudly supported by Charles River. Your partner in accelerating the path from concept to cure because every moment matters. With a seamless continuum of R&D, biologics testing and end-of-rem manufacturing from antibodies to cell and gene therapies, Charles River helps you move confidently towards market approval. Discover how it's integrated approach speeds development, reduces risk and brings the author of e-depotions faster. Then there you have it. That was Ankit Gupta who is the CEO at Tentchy Thaisin. What a delight Vulturep he is. I really really like him. He's got such a lovely humble manner to the way that he is and articulates himself so so well. I'm so glad that we were able to bring Ankit's story to you today listener. From reflections from me, love is accidental, journey into farmer one that resonates with me very much. Again, some similarities how his exposure to the value chain and different types of clients in this sector ultimately led him to working on the client side. Critical for him was getting into the strides business in which echoes my own experience in the sector working for marketing agencies and then ultimately ended up running marketing for a CDMO. The rest is history as they say and obviously being very well thought of within strides and cutting his teeth, and earning his strides within different parts of the organization before being given the honor of becoming CEO at Tentchy Thaisin. Love how we talked about that. They looked at different technology plays within there and tried different things and any entrepreneurial business would do and then they've had real traction with the insta-pill, a more all drug development technology platform which seems to be doing really really well for the reasons that Ankit talked about in a very well placed at the minute. Towards the back end of the interview, I think it's a theme we're seeing more and more, the kind of the not just the potential of India but its its increasing presence in this space. I love how he talked about how India is now kind of looking to lead the D of CDMO as well as the M which has been its historic position in and I thought it was super useful for us to just get a lay of the land of the Bifarman Farm Area system geographically as well. That's not something I knew much about. Maybe anecdotally had a sense but having someone in the inside kind of paint that picture I thought was really really useful. Great guess, thank you to Ankit, thank you to you, most importantly, listener thanks for being here thanks to my team for pulling today's podcast together and please like and share the episode. Whatever you're listening to today and I'll see you racing. Hi again, thanks for tuning in to today's show. I really hope you enjoyed the episode. A more shows have a look on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, whatever you like to listen and do make sure that you subscribe so the next episode comes directly to your device automatically and please get in touch via our website at Molecule Tomarket. pod or via LinkedIn or Twitter. We love to hear from you. So if you have a guest that you want to suggest or someone in your organization, you think would make great guests on the molecule to market and please let us know. We'll see you very soon. You're listening to Molecule to Market, where we go inside the outsourcing space of the Global Drug Development sector. The podcast for professionals working in the Farmer and Biotech contract services space. Molecule to Market is sponsored and funded by Remarketing, an international content, digital and design agency that helps companies get noticed, raise profile, and generate leads in life sciences.