Most of us have never thought about the 100 trillion microbes living inside us. We can’t see them, we can’t feel them directly, and conventional medicine has largely ignored them for decades. But these organisms, collectively called the microbiome, are quietly regulating our metabolism, shaping our immune responses, influencing our mood, and in many cases, driving the chronic diseases that are becoming India’s most pressing health crisis.
Kumar Sankaran, Prabhath Kamati Manjappa, and Dr. Debojyoti Dhar thought about little else.
The three had first worked together in 2009 at a drug discovery company in Bengaluru. When they reunited in 2014 to found Leucine Rich Bio, they carried with them a shared conviction: that biology was being dramatically undersold by the healthcare system, and that the microbiome represented one of medicine’s most important and most neglected frontiers. Their mission, from day one, was to enrich and simplify biology, to take something genuinely complex and make it actionable for real people managing real health challenges.
By 2017, they had built South Asia’s first gut microbiome test. A year later, BugSpeaks was born as a full wellness package. The gut, it turned out, was only the beginning.
Why the Microbiome, and Why India
The science behind BugSpeaks starts with a problem that modern medicine handles poorly: chronic disease. Conditions like obesity, type 2 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, and autoimmune disorders are typically managed symptomatically, treated at the surface while their root causes go unexamined. What decades of emerging research has shown is that microbial imbalance, or dysbiosis, drives or significantly amplifies many of these conditions. The gut microbiome regulates metabolism and inflammation. The skin microbiome maintains the skin barrier and influences everything from acne to ageing. The gut-skin axis links these systems in ways that are only beginning to be understood.
India made this problem especially urgent. The country is facing an explosion of chronic and lifestyle diseases at increasingly younger ages, a trend driven by rapid dietary shifts, widespread antibiotic use, and urbanisation. Generic solutions, both medical and nutritional, were failing to keep pace because they treated a diverse population as though they shared identical biology.
This is where the BugSpeaks founding team saw something their global competitors consistently missed. The major international players in microbiome science had built their databases and algorithms on Western dietary data and Western genetics. The Indian gut, shaped by centuries of distinct food culture, a different genetic makeup, and a different disease landscape, was simply not represented in their models. Recommendations calibrated for a Western baseline weren’t just imprecise for Indian users. They were often irrelevant.
“The Indian gut is genuinely distinct,” Dr. Dhar explains. “That is a gap our competitors have consistently failed to account for, and it is the exact space we have built our platform around.”
What BugSpeaks Actually Does
The product experience is deliberately straightforward, even if the science underneath is anything but. A user receives a DIY kit, collects a stool sample at home, and sends it to the BugSpeaks lab. There, Next-Generation Sequencing builds a detailed picture of the individual’s microbial ecosystem, identifying thousands of species, their relative abundances, and the patterns that connect them to health outcomes.
What the user receives back is not a data dump. It is a personalised nutritional roadmap, practical, immediately actionable, and calibrated specifically to their microbial profile and South Asian dietary context. The BugSpeaks Score and Susceptibility Index cover more than 15 chronic diseases, giving users a genuinely individualised picture of where their health may be heading and what they can do about it now.
The Rychbiome nutraceutical range, launched in 2021, closes the loop between diagnosis and intervention. India’s first microbiome data-based nutraceutical brand, it now carries seven products, including personalised probiotics, designed around the actual microbial findings the platform generates. In 2025, BugSpeaks expanded further with South Asia’s, Southeast Asia’s, and the Middle East’s first skin microbiome test, bringing the same diagnostic rigour to skin health. Vaginal and oral microbiome tests are in the pipeline.
The Long Road to Trust
Getting here wasn’t quick, and the team is candid about that. In 2017 and 2018, gut health awareness in India was minimal. Convincing someone to collect a stool sample and mail it to a lab, for a test most of their doctors had never heard of, required patience and education in equal measure. The team’s earliest users were functional medicine practitioners and bio-hackers already invested in proactive health management. They gave honest feedback and helped refine the product in ways that mattered.
One early assumption proved wrong almost immediately. The founders had expected clinicians to be their primary channel. Instead, their earliest adopters were health-conscious individuals already managing their own wellness, people who were motivated to stay ahead of problems rather than treat them after the fact. That insight reshaped how BugSpeaks positions itself and who it speaks to.
The product-market fit moment came when the team made a deliberate shift in how they presented their findings. Detailed genomic data is impressive but can be paralysing. When the output was reframed as a practical lifestyle guide that users could act on within the same week, engagement changed fundamentally. The science didn’t change. The communication did.
“We stopped centring around the science and started centring around what the science could do for the person reading the report,” Dr. Dhar reflects.
Building clinical credibility took even longer, and the team chose to prioritise it over speed. BugSpeaks is the only microbiome test in India with both NABL and NABH accreditation, the company holds ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 17025:2017 certifications, and has received the national startup award under a Government of India initiative. More significantly, it is the only company in South Asia to have completed and published a clinical trial on gut microbiome testing in a chronic disease, type 2 diabetes, with trials in cancer and other conditions currently underway.
“In health-tech, the only thing that earns trust is rigorous, careful proof,” Dr. Dhar says. “We will always choose credibility over speed.”
That patience has generated a remarkable success story. One user came to BugSpeaks after suffering from unexplained rashes that had resisted conventional treatment. The test revealed the presence of certain fungi in her gut, organisms not typically found in healthy individuals. Her treating clinician prescribed a short course of antifungal medication. The rashes disappeared. It was a vivid demonstration of something BugSpeaks exists to prove: that symptoms appearing in one part of the body often have their origins somewhere else entirely.
Numbers That Reflect a Decade of Groundwork
The growth trajectory BugSpeaks is now running tells the story of what happens when a decade of scientific groundwork meets a market that is finally ready. Turnover of ₹1.5 crore in FY 2023-24 grew to ₹4.4 crore in FY 2024-25, a 175% jump, and reached ₹7.0 crore in FY 2025-26, representing a CAGR of 116.02 % across three years. Inquiries have grown 300% year on year. The platform holds over 90% market share in gut microbiome testing in India.
The company of around 50 people now exports to Bulgaria, Qatar, Brazil, the Philippines, UAE, and Thailand, and partners with most of India’s major diagnostic chains. Its microbiome dataset, accumulated through years of testing across a genuinely diverse Indian population, is among the largest gut microbiome repositories in the region, and it grows more valuable as the platform scales.
A Microbial Map of the Human Body
The long-term vision at BugSpeaks extends well beyond any single test or product category. Mr Kumar Sankaran, Mr Manjappa and Dr. Dhar are working toward what they describe as a microbiome-first health ecosystem, a future where every clinical decision, nutritional recommendation, and wellness choice is informed by an individual’s complete microbial environment. Gut, skin, vaginal, oral, a comprehensive map of the microbes that live in and on us, and a platform that translates that map into health guidance people can actually use.
The accumulated data also points toward drug discovery, an application that could eventually make BugSpeaks not just a diagnostics company but a contributor to the development of new treatments for the chronic diseases it currently helps users manage.
“The gut was always the entry point,” Mr Kumar says. “The destination is a complete microbial map of the human body.”
For a team that has spent over a decade being told they were ahead of their time, the market is finally catching up. And BugSpeaks, with its first-mover advantage, its proprietary South Asian dataset, and its hard-won clinical credibility, is positioned to lead the field it helped create.
“Start with the why of your science,” Dr. Dhar advises fellow entrepreneurs. “Be patient with your science. Be straight with your users. Build something you would stake your name on without a second thought. The rest follows.”
