PreferCo Names Shakthi M. Nagappan as Chairman & Managing Director
After a decade building Hyderabad’s life sciences ecosystem, Nagappan turns entrepreneur to build India’s next biomanufacturing opportunity
PreferCo, a precision fermentation company headquartered in Hyderabad, today announced that Shakthi Nagappan will lead the company as Chairman & Managing Director, as it builds an integrated platform spanning strain engineering, process development and bioprocess scale-up being built in partnership with German process technology major Glatt.
Nagappan brings close to two decades of experience at the intersection of life sciences, industry and government. As the former CEO of the Telangana Life Sciences Foundation, he played a key role in the development of Hyderabad and Telangana into one of Asia’s leading life sciences hubs. During his tenure, Telangana’s life sciences ecosystem expanded significantly in scale and global stature witnessing investments to the USD 15 Bn and today hosts nine of the world’s top lifesciences companies, alongside more than 2,000 life sciences companies. Nagappan continues to be associated with the Government of Telangana in an advisory capacity on life sciences.
PreferCo is being built at an important inflection point for industrial biotechnology. The opportunity for biomanufacturing is expanding rapidly, with BCG estimating a $200 billion market for biomanufactured ingredients by 2040 and an approximately 20-fold expansion in biomanufacturing capacity required to capture this potential. India has also identified biomanufacturing as a strategic national priority through its BioE3 Policy, with an ambition to position the country as a leading global biomanufacturing hub.
Against this backdrop, PreferCo is building an integrated precision fermentation platform in Hyderabad focused on one of the industry’s most critical challenges — translating promising biology from the laboratory into robust and commercially viable manufacturing at scale.
Speaking on his new role, Shakthi Nagappan, said: “I am enormously excited about this opportunity. India demonstrated through vaccines that it can combine science, engineering talent, manufacturing excellence and scale to become one of the world’s most trusted manufacturing hubs. I believe we have the opportunity to build a similar position for India in industrial biotechnology and biomanufacturing. Our ambition is to work with both emerging innovators and established companies globally — helping discover, develop and scale products from India for global markets.”
Akhil Gawar, Co-Founder & CEO, PreferCo, who led the led initiatives in the food processing sector for the Government till 2025 said: “I am delighted to welcome Shakthi onboard. Shakthi and I have worked together for several years on building industries and attracting investments into Telangana. Through our respective work in biotechnology and food processing, we have seen the opportunity from two different vantage points — from the biological technologies and talent needed to build these platforms, to the agricultural value chains and feedstocks that can underpin them. Precision fermentation brings these worlds together. We believe India has the potential to emerge as an important global base for industrial biotechnology. As precision fermentation reaches an important inflection point globally, his leadership will be central to our ambition of building PreferCo into a globally relevant company.”