Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and Family

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw started Biocon in a garage in 1978 in a sector that did not yet exist in India. The company she built now supplies biosimilar insulin to patients in 120 countries.

She started Biocon as an enzyme manufacturing business in Bengaluru, in an era when Indian biotechnology did not exist as an industry. The early work in fermentation technology for enzymes established the scientific capabilities that the company subsequently applied to biopharmaceuticals, a more complex and regulated category requiring mammalian cell culture, purification and clinical development capabilities that took decades to build. That these capabilities were built by an Indian company founded by a woman in a sector where both facts were unusual at the time is part of the founding story, though the business record stands independently of it.

Biocon is now the original large-scale biopharmaceutical company from India, with revenues exceeding Rs 15,000 crore in fiscal 2025 and a manufacturing footprint that supplies biosimilar insulin, immunosuppressants and oncology drugs to patients in over 120 countries. The Mazumdar-Shaw Medical Centre in Bengaluru provides cancer treatment at substantially subsidised rates, reflecting the family's commitment to making expensive biological therapies accessible to patients who cannot pay market prices.