When pharmaceutical companies talk about pivoting to contract development & manufacturing (CDMO), the market tends to be sceptical. The pitch is familiar: backward integration, innovator partnerships and the promise of sticky revenue that commands premium valuations. What is far less common is a platform that can back the pitch with three clean USFDA outcomes and a CDMO pipeline growing 40-50 per cent compounded annually. That is the position Sekhmet Pharmaventures occupies today.
Sekhmet is a nearly Rs1,500-crore-plus revenue platform backed by PAG – an alternative investment firm focused on APAC, with roughly $55 billion in assets under management. A consortium of PAG, CX and Samara had acquired Chennai-based Anjan Drugs in October 2020 and Hyderabad-based Optimus Drugs in September 2022. Anjan brought three decades of regulated-market heritage, anchor innovator relationships and green chemistry credentials, while Optimus brought a 250-plus-scientist R&D engine.
Sekhmet’s structure is deliberately a twin brand, with both businesses complementing each other to bring collective strength in serving the needs of CDMO players and MNCs. There are three operating companies: Anjan Drugs, Optimus Drugs and Optimus Pharma. The founders who built them, Srinivas Reddy of Optimus and C. Kalaichelvan of Anjan, retain close to 30 per cent of the stake and are on the board, while the day-to-day operations are under professional management.
Sekhmet’s management is led by Santosh Mahil, MD & CEO, who brings three decades of experience across business development, operations, market development and M&A, most recently as CEO, Shilpa Pharma Life Sciences. Nikhil Srivastava, Board Chairman, Sekhmet Pharmaventures as well as Partner and Co-head of Private Equity, PAG.
“The two businesses gave us the foundational ingredients to build a full-spectrum CDMO platform,” says Mahil. “That is exactly what we have been executing”. The company’s CDMO segment today accounts for more than 40 per cent of revenue and is growing with 40-50 per cent CAGR. Underneath the headline, the revenue mix is more textured than a single CDMO number suggests. More than 40 per cent comes from CDMO, 10-15 per cent from MNC business and the remaining from API generics – primarily branded generics in regulated markets.
Structural growth
“Sekhmet’s pivot to an integrated CDMO platform is unlocking exponential growth,” says Srivastava. “We have three clean USFDA inspections in a single year; we are building sticky, long-term partnerships with innovators across the US, Europe and Japan. This is not opportunistic growth – it is structural”.
The MNC segment is the specific one. Once a drug loses patent protection, Sekhmet offers the multinational a more cost-effective, self-developed process and gets qualified into that company’s own global brand supply chain. The qualification can take three to five years and often comes to nothing, but once secured it can anchor a relationship for ten to twenty years, which is why few Indian peers formalise it as a distinct, strategically resourced line.
In CDMO, the economics are fundamentally different from generic API. “We walk an innovator’s molecule through most of the phases – early development, scale-up, validation and commercial supply – and that handholding builds a partnership, not a transaction,” adds Mahil. “Qualifying a site for a commercial molecule takes multiple years and is difficult to displace once it is in place. The revenue is sticky, the visibility is long, and the switching cost for the customer is exactly what protects the relationship. Project management and customer service reinforce that stickiness further.”
The same logic runs through the wider customer book. Across the platform, Sekhmet serves multiple customers, with strength in less-regulated markets (more than 100 globally), when the full platform is counted. The stated aim over the 1,000-day horizon is to grow the set of customers buying multiple products and increase share of wallet, deepening relationships rather than only widening the funnel.
“Global customers increasingly expect more than manufacturing capacity,” affirms Srinivas Bollam, head, Global CDMO, Sekhmet. “They seek trusted CDMO partners offering scientific expertise, operational excellence and long-term commitment. At Sekhmet, we build deep-rooted relationships through transparency and reliability, combining complex chemistry, regulatory excellence, and robust CMC capabilities to accelerate molecules from concept to commercialisation with confidence. In CDMO, success is measured not by transactions, but by becoming an extension of the customer’s team, bringing execution discipline and consistently exceeding expectations throughout the product lifecycle.”
The growth is not coming from a single large contract or an opportunistic windfall. It is being built through a systematic expansion of the CDMO funnel. Sekhmet’s 250-plus scientist R&D engine now operates as a dedicated CDMO response machine, fielding a growing volume of RFIs and RFQs from innovators across Europe, the US and Japan, and converting them into active development programmes at an accelerating rate. New CDMO projects are being onboarded across both brands, each one moving through a defined qualification cycle: feasibility assessment, process development, pilot-scale validation, regulatory filing support, and eventual commercial supply. The pipeline today is materially deeper than it was even twelve months ago. Each new project that enters the funnel extends the platform’s revenue visibility by three to five years, and each successful delivery strengthens the reference base for the next innovator conversation. The platform has also begun cautiously deploying AI for RFP response acceleration and select R&D functions, adding speed without compromising scientific rigour.
Strategy for growth
The trajectory behind that ambition is already visible in the numbers. Sekhmet is poised to grow at 25-30 per cent CAGR, on the way to the R2,000 crore mark it wants to touch in the next 2-3 years. Management frames the journey as a 1,000-day plan, a defined set of board-tracked deliverables rather than an open-ended aspiration. And Q1 2026-27 results have already validated the strategy. The platform delivered top-line growth of over 50 per cent on a year-on-year basis for Q1, keeping the core business intact while scaling the CDMO segment.
Several markers give the re-rating case its ballast. The platform has filed close to 60 US DMFs across therapy areas. The platform holds a genuine niche as one of the world’s largest makers of valproic acid derivatives, built on more than three decades of water-based, low-solvent chemistry that European innovators increasingly demand as sustainability proof.
The valuation arithmetic underscores the stakes. Integrated CDMO platforms in India now command 35-45x EV/EBIDTA, a tier that reflects the stickiness, visibility and margin quality of innovator-facing contract manufacturing. Traditional pharmaceutical manufacturers trading at 13-15x sit in a fundamentally different category. For a platform that is actively crossing from one tier to the other, with the compliance credentials, chemistry depth and innovator pipeline to justify the migration, the implied re-rating headroom is material.
In CDMO, compliance is the primary qualification gate, not a hygiene factor. “Compliance is not a cost,” adds Mahil. “It is what gets you in the room,” he says, elaborating that “compliance sits at the core of our philosophy – it is designed into how we build, operate and run every site, not inspected in at the end. Roughly a fifth of our workforce is dedicated to quality and compliance, and our facilities are sustained under USFDA, EU-GMP, WHO-GMP, EDQM, PMDA, COFEPRIS and KFDA. For an innovator deciding who to trust with their molecule, that track record is the price of entry – without it, you never get the conversation, let alone the contract.”
“Our philosophy is simple – compliance, operational excellence and customer commitment are inseparable,” contends Durga Prasad, COO, Sekhmet. “Strong Quality systems enable efficient operations, reliable supply and on-time delivery. Compliance is our core; by embedding it into every aspect of manufacturing, we create a trustful platform that helps customers bring their products to market with confidence”.
To support the CDMO ramp and other demands, Sekhmet is making investments to add about 400 kl of high-compliance reactor capacity, targeted for completion of the project by the end of this financial year. Utilisation is expected to hit 70-75 per cent by 2026-27, based on existing orderbook visibility. The capacity is not speculative; it is being pulled forward by signed CDMO engagements across Europe, the US and Japan. The macro tailwind is the strongest in a generation. The US BIOSECURE Act, signed in December 2025, is forcing innovators to diversify away from China-linked CDMOs on a defined timeline. India’s CRDMO sector is estimated at $3-3.5 billion, representing a small share of 2-3 per cent of the global CRDMO market. With strong underlying capabilities and significant untapped opportunity, the industry appears well-positioned for accelerated growth.
The build-out is being funded from internal accruals and it is moving quickly, with five of the six plants already under expansion over a 10-12-month window for full completion. The fifth Hyderabad unit is expected to come under expansion soon.