Indian biotech startup PopVax has manufactured the clinical batch of PVX-001 — an open-source, broadly protective COVID-19 vaccine candidate — at its RNA Foundry in Hyderabad. Phase I trials are set to begin in Australia in mid-2026.

AI-Designed, Open-Source Vaccine

PopVax was founded in late 2021 by Soham Sankaran with under $50k in personal funding and no formal biology background. The company built an end-to-end RNA platform from scratch, combining generative AI for protein design with a novel mRNA architecture and in-house lipid nanoparticle delivery — all under one roof.

PVX-001 is open-source: the design files, protocols, and manufacturing details will be publicly available, enabling any lab to reproduce and study the vaccine independently.

Backed by Balvi and Gates

The program was funded by $20M from Vitalik Buterin's Balvi fund and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Additional grants of $6M came from BARDA (the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority), Renaissance Philanthropy, and Gates. PopVax also recently closed a $7.5M equity round led by Good Ventures, the foundation of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna.

Vitalik, who has championed the "d/acc" (defensive accelerationism) philosophy, called the milestone part of "the full-stack d/acc roadmap shipping."

What's Next

PopVax is targeting HCV, TB, Strep A, and malaria next — diseases responsible for roughly 2.4 million deaths per year. The 100-person team in Hyderabad aims to take all four into clinical trials by 2027.