From the Ground Up
Two generations of this family have left what they were given to build their own. In 1980, Miheer Chinai left the family business to build a trading company, negotiating one of the largest alumina supply contracts of its kind in the country, followed by a JV in chemical manufacturing. In 2015, Mishaal Chinai did the same with Cerigo’s initial foray into the manufacture of alkylated benzisothiazolinones.
The First Plant
In 1995 Miheer Chinai built a plant at Taloja, outside Mumbai, to make a molecule India was importing. The joint venture, with Rohm & Haas and Nipa, was Chinai Chemicals, later renamed Novacel Life Sciences.
The manufacturing was equipped with continuous processing via tube reactors and distributed control systems. This was unique for an Indian specialty chemical plant at the time and supported the growing global demand for BIT.
In 2007 the plant and its registration passed to one of the industry's largest producers.
Quality Control Lab, Taloja, 1995
The Chairman's Note
"Novacel integrated manufacturing with regulatory access, joining forces with some of the industry's established names. Our role narrowed to manufacturing and market access, and that focus let us build a supply base few plants at our scale could match."
Miheer Chinai, Chairman
Cerigo Today
Cerigo was founded in 2015. Its plant was specified for hazardous work from the start, because the people specifying it had run it before. The core chemistry has not changed. What has changed is that more than one route now runs into it, one of them from phthalic anhydride, as in 1995.
Reactors and separation trains built for corrosion-intensive, gas-phase chemistry, run as standard rather than as an exception.
The first plant made an active and stopped there. This one runs from route definition through to end-use systems, creating a platform that supports a genuinely differentiated CDMO.
Both times the point was the same: to make here what this industry imported. That is the foundation. The vision is to keep innovating beyond, into chemistry nobody has built yet.