Rajani Battu spent two decades telling patients nothing could be done, then co-founded Eyestem to change the answer

There is a particular consultation that retina specialists in India learn to dread. A patient in their sixties or seventies has noticed that faces have gone blurry in the middle, that reading has become impossible, that there is a grey smudge sitting exactly where they are trying to look. The diagnosis is geographic atrophy, the advanced form of dry age-related macular degeneration. Cells in the macula are dying. Central vision goes and does not come back.

The consultation is difficult because of what comes next, which for most of the last thirty years has been nothing. There is no surgery. There is no drug that restores what has gone. The doctor explains the condition, suggests magnifiers, and schedules a follow-up to document further decline.

Dr Rajani Battu had that conversation for two decades. Eyestem, the Bengaluru cell-therapy company she co-founded, exists because she got tired of having it. Its lead candidate has now completed a first human trial in which the first six patients gained an average of 15.8 letters of vision over six months, and in January 2026 India’s drug regulator cleared it to begin Phase 2.

Twenty years of retina surgery first

Battu is not a scientist who wandered into medicine or a founder who hired clinical expertise. She is the clinician, and the company is downstream of the clinic. She has practised vitreo-retinal surgery for over twenty years and is a senior consultant in ophthalmology at Aster CMI Hospital in Bengaluru.

Alongside the surgical practice she built a second thing that explains a great deal about how Eyestem happened. She is the founder medical director of the Centre for Eye Genetics and Research in Bengaluru, a not-for-profit dedicated to patients with degenerative retinal disease. Inherited and degenerative retinal conditions are exactly the category where a doctor accumulates patients she cannot treat, year after year, and keeps seeing them anyway. Setting up an organisation around that group of patients is not a career move. It is what happens when the untreatable ones stay on your mind.

Education and training

She took her MBBS at Bangalore Medical College and her master’s at St John’s Medical College, also in Bangalore, then obtained a fellowship from the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. Her vitreo-retinal surgical training was at Sankara Nethralaya in Chennai, one of the more demanding places in the country to learn the subspecialty.

The part of the training that matters most for what she later built is the narrowest. She held an International Council of Ophthalmology fellowship in inherited retinal diseases with Professor Anthony Moore at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, and won an AFER/ARVO visiting researcher award in the United States in 2009. She also serves as adjunct faculty at the Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology. Eye genetics is a small field with a specific frustration built into it, which is that it lets you diagnose with real precision and then offer almost nothing.

How Eyestem started

The origin is a coincidence that the company has described publicly more than once. In 2015 Dr Jogin Desai, who had a background in biotechnology, came to see her as a patient. What followed was not a pitch meeting. She introduced him to some of the people in her practice with degenerative retinal disease, and he saw the size of the problem from the side that patients experience rather than the side that appears in a market report.

Eyestem traces to late 2015, started by Desai, Battu and Dr Dhruv Sareen, a stem-cell scientist. Desai is founder and chief executive. Battu is chief medical officer, which in a cell therapy company is not a ceremonial title. Somebody has to decide which indication to chase first, design a trial that a regulator will accept, recruit surgeons across multiple hospitals to perform a delicate subretinal injection consistently, and read the results honestly. That is the job, and it needs somebody who has spent twenty years operating on the tissue in question.

What Eyecyte-RPE actually is

Underneath the light-sensing cells of the retina sits a layer called the retinal pigment epithelium. It does the housekeeping. It clears waste, moves nutrients and keeps the photoreceptors above it alive. In geographic atrophy this layer degenerates, and the photoreceptors die for lack of support. The visible result is the grey patch in the middle of the patient’s sight.

Eyecyte-RPE is a replacement for that layer. It is grown from human induced pluripotent stem cells, adult cells reprogrammed into a state from which they can be directed to become almost anything, and delivered under the retina. The premise is straightforward even though the manufacturing is not. Put back the support cells and the remaining photoreceptors may hold on, and in some cases recover function.

The economics are the second half of the idea. Cell therapies elsewhere in the world carry prices that put them permanently out of reach of most Indian patients. A therapy for an age-related condition affecting very large numbers of people only means anything if it can be manufactured at a cost a middle-income country can absorb, which is a scale-up and process-engineering problem rather than a biology one, and it is the problem the company has organised itself around.

The trial results, and what they do and do not prove

The Phase 1/2a study reported no serious adverse events, which for a first-in-human cell therapy injected under the retina is the result that matters most. Safety was the question the trial was designed to answer.

It also produced an efficacy signal that was not guaranteed. The first six patients gained an average of 15.8 letters on the standard vision chart over six months. In a condition where the expected trajectory is downward, an average gain of roughly three lines is substantial. Ophthalmologists involved in the study described patients reading large print, recognising faces and moving around with more confidence.

The honest caveat belongs here rather than in a footnote. Six patients is six patients. Early trials are small, unblinded and prone to flattering results that do not survive contact with a larger controlled study. The Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation cleared Phase 2 in January 2026, and a Phase 3 of roughly 200 patients across five centres including Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai has been described as the step after that. Those are the studies that will decide whether this works.

Funding

The company’s most recent round is a 10 million dollar Series B, co-led by Raju Barwale and Sandeep Singh, managing director of Alkem Laboratories, with a consortium of Indian pharmaceutical companies including Alkem, NATCO and Biological E participating. Earlier institutional backers include Endiya Partners and Kotak Investment Advisors. The stated use of proceeds is completing the Indian Phase 2 and preparing an investigational new drug filing with the US Food and Drug Administration.

Who put the money in is as informative as how much. Three established Indian pharmaceutical manufacturers backing a cell therapy is a signal about the manufacturing thesis specifically. These are companies whose core competence is producing complex medicine at a price Indian patients pay.

Rajani Battu’s net worth and ownership

There is no verified public net-worth figure. Eyestem is private, has not disclosed the valuation attached to any round, and her shareholding sits alongside two co-founders and a set of institutional and strategic investors across at least two rounds. None of that is on the public record, so any number published against her name has been generated rather than reported.

It is also the wrong frame for a company at this stage. A clinical-stage cell therapy has no revenue and no approved product. What it has is a safety result, an efficacy signal in six people and permission to run a larger study. The value of the equity is entirely contingent on trials that have not finished.

What Rajani Battu’s story teaches Indian founders

The first lesson is that deep domain experience is not a slower route to founding something. It is often the only route. Twenty years of retina surgery gave her the patient population, the understanding of what a meaningful outcome looks like, the credibility to recruit other surgeons and the judgement to design a trial a regulator would accept. None of that could have been acquired quickly, and a company in this category cannot be built without it.

The second is that founding does not require being the chief executive. She is the co-founder and chief medical officer of a company somebody else runs day to day, and the division of labour is rational. Clinical strategy in a cell therapy company is a full job that happens to require a surgeon. Insisting on the title would have made the company worse.

The third is about the market that a doctor sees before an analyst does. A clinician spending two decades saying there is nothing to offer is looking at unmet demand in its rawest form, described by the people experiencing it. Not every such observation is a company. But the ones that are tend to be visible from a clinic long before they are visible anywhere else.

The fourth is the one specific to Indian deep tech. Building a cell therapy in India only makes sense if the cost of manufacture ends up within reach of Indian patients, which means the constraint has to be designed in from the beginning rather than solved after approval. Choosing to work inside that constraint is what makes the whole project worth doing, and it is also why three Indian pharma companies were willing to fund it.

Frequently asked questions about Rajani Battu and Eyestem

Who is Rajani Battu?

Dr Rajani Battu is a vitreo-retinal surgeon and eye-genetics specialist in Bengaluru, and a co-founder and chief medical officer of Eyestem. She is a senior consultant in ophthalmology at Aster CMI Hospital and the founder medical director of the Centre for Eye Genetics and Research, a not-for-profit for patients with degenerative retinal disease. She has practised retina surgery for more than two decades.

What is Eyestem and who founded it?

Eyestem is a Bengaluru cell-therapy company working on degenerative eye disease. It traces to late 2015 and was started by Jogin Desai, Rajani Battu and Dhruv Sareen. Desai is founder and chief executive, Battu is chief medical officer.

What does Eyecyte-RPE treat?

Geographic atrophy caused by dry age-related macular degeneration, an advanced condition in which cells in the macula die and central vision is lost progressively and irreversibly. Eyecyte-RPE is made from human induced pluripotent stem cells and is designed to replace the damaged retinal pigment epithelial cells underneath the retina.

What were the Phase 1 trial results?

The Phase 1/2a study reported a clean safety profile with no serious adverse events, and an average gain of 15.8 letters of vision in the first six patients over six months. Doctors involved reported patients able to read large print, recognise faces and move around with more confidence.

Has Eyestem been approved for Phase 2?

Yes. The Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation cleared the company to begin Phase 2 in January 2026. A larger Phase 3 across roughly 200 patients and five centres including Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai has been described as the following step, alongside preparation of an investigational new drug filing with the US FDA.

How much funding has Eyestem raised?

Its most recent round was a 10 million dollar Series B, co-led by Raju Barwale and Alkem Laboratories managing director Sandeep Singh, with a consortium of Indian pharmaceutical companies including Alkem, NATCO and Biological E. Earlier backers include Endiya Partners and Kotak Investment Advisors.

What is Rajani Battu’s net worth?

There is no verified public figure. Eyestem is a private company that has not disclosed the valuation attached to its rounds, and her shareholding alongside two co-founders and several institutional investors is not on the public record. Any number published against her name online is unverified.