The entrepreneurial journey of Anu Acharya started in 2000 when she decided to move back to Hyderabad from Chicago. She founded a company, called Ocimum Bio Solutions, which helps scientist do their research.
Ocimum did a verity of things, and they went through 3 acquisitions and two rounds of funding from Kubera Partners and World Bank. Over a period of 14 years, they continued growing the company. For Anu Acharya, all that was great, but not enough. She asked herself, “What is it that you really want to do? The real desire was to be able to create an impact. To create a big impact you have to look at how you actually affect people directly. When you are working merely on research side you are working as a sub contractor to the pharma companies. The process is long. So you are not directly impacting people. That was the main driver to start MapMyGenome.”
How MapMyGenome started
In 2011, Anu started saying, “We should do something else in this space.” It was a tough thing for them ‘to do something else’ because Ocimum Bio was already doing well in the same space. She floated the idea to the current investors and the board of Ocimum Bio to make MapMyGenome as a subsidiary. The board didn’t want a subsidiary which is consumer oriented because it was deviating from the core of Ocimum Bio mandate. Which Anu thinks was a blessing in disguise. MapMyGenome was incubated for two years, and there was an agreement on how many hours Ocimum would devote to MapMyGenome.