Fifteen years ago, BV Ravi Kumar had an HIV test kit ready, but bureaucrats would have none of it. Today, his company services 25 hospitals for brain, eye and other critical infection tests.

Bangalore: The top floor of Xcyton Diagnostics Ltd at Peenya industrial estate in Bangalore houses the biological safety level, or BSL-3, labs—advanced research centres where some very infectious pathogens are scrutinized. Once commissioned, the lab will aid development of diagnostics for multi-drug resistant tuberculosis.

As he gives a tour of the labs, founder and managing director B.V. Ravi Kumar relives his roller-coaster ride as an entrepreneur. The 15 years come flooding back, most of it a telling account of how difficult it was, and still is, for start-ups to raise money for developing new products, particularly in life sciences.

“The government agencies then considered the private sector evil. Venture capitalists (VCs), on the other hand, were scared of product companies,” reminisces Kumar. He says one of the early VCs in Mumbai had told him that his idea of using tissue culture for growing skin for burn transplants looked convincing when he presented his business plan, but called it fiction once he returned to Bangalore.

That observation, in a sense, guided his entrepreneurial direction—from skin to advanced molecular diagnostics. By then, he had already developed the world’s first diagnostic kit for neurocysticercosis (an infection of the central nervous system), while working at Astra Research Centre India, which later morphed into AstraZeneca Plc, the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company. It later gifted the neurocysticercosis patent to Xcyton.

Pooling Rs51 lakh from 38 friends and acquaintances, including three professors from Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science (IISc) from where Kumar got his doctoral degree after an MBBS from the Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (Jipmer) in Puducherry, he set up Xcyton. In its maiden life sciences funding, the Small Industries Development Bank of India lent him Rs1 crore.