It was while pursuing his master’s degree in endodontic surgery at JSS Medical College, Mysuru, that Peddi Shanmukh Srinivas came across American physicist Richard Feynman’s seminal lecture ‘There’s plenty of room at the bottom’. One vision from it stuck with him — a future where the role of a surgeon is shrunk to a gadget the size of a pill, which can be swallowed to perform therapeutic tasks within the body.

“Feynman prophesied that,” says Srinivas. “We’re trying to make it a reality.”

The CEO and co-founder of Theranautilus, a medical hardware company with a focus on nanorobot fabrication, says starting a company wasn’t his original plan. “I come from a working-class family. Entrepreneurship was never the dream. I just wanted to do research — it felt more creative.”

During his PhD programme at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, he met Dr Debayan Dasgupta and Prof Ambarish Ghosh, and the trio joined forces to explore the use of nanorobots in dental procedures like root canals.

The first hurdle pertained to visibility: How can one even see a nanorobot inside an opaque structure like a tooth, they wondered. After more than a year of late nights and failed attempts, their breakthrough came when they saw the nanorobot move inside the tooth, back and forth, under control.

Trial run

Five-year-old Theranautilus is currently preparing for the clinical trials of its first product — designed to treat dental sensitivity. “We’ve developed a class of nanorobots that are applied to the affected tooth. A device activates them, and they go inside to identify and repair areas with enamel loss or gum recession,” explains Srinivas.

“Think of them as nano-engineers, about a billionth of a metre in size, working inside your teeth.”

The process takes just 15 minutes, and the initial results suggest a long-lasting fix. “Unlike a sensitivity toothpaste, this offers a semi-permanent solution... we’ve seen no recurrence for three to six months.”

A spin-off from IISc, Theranautilus raised $1.2 million in seed funding in November 2024 from Pi Ventures, Golden Sparrow Ventures, and angel investors including Lalit Keshre (Groww) and Abhishek Goyal (Tracxn). The funding is supporting clinical work, with human efficacy data expected by October this year.

Global attention

The startup is attracting interest from global oral healthcare majors — including in India, Europe, the US, and Japan — which are keen to license its technology. A Series A funding round is planned 8–9 months after trial results.

For the company, dentistry is just the beginning. “We’re building pipelines in cancer care, among other areas. Each solution takes 4–5 years. The hard part is finding a single approach that generalises across tissues,” Srinivas says.

With 100 per cent recovery rates in animal trials, the team is hopeful. Srinivas recalls what his co-founder Dasgupta told him during a low point: “Science is not easy. We’ve worked day and night, sometimes frustrated, sometimes stuck. But, if you prove something truly new, you create a path to immortality. That’s what keeps us going.”

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Published on June 22, 2025