For over a decade, we’ve been spending time in health and bio. It’s a category we’ve been watching closely.

In the early days, we wrote a lot about the space – from healthcare marketplaces to the role of genomics in personalized medicine. And we made a handful of investments in tools and diagnostics like:

• Gencove — sequencing software infrastructure for academic, agriculture, biotech, diagnostic, and pharma organizations
• Scanwell — smartphone-based at-home diagnostics, later acquired by BD
• Qvin — turning menstrual blood into a new diagnostic medium

We learned a lot throughout the years and despite meeting many great teams after these initial investments, we sat on the sidelines. The timing still felt early as scaling biology continued to be slow and capital intensive. The software and experimental tooling stacks weren’t mature enough, and regulatory and commercialization pathways remained difficult. Even when we revisited the space in 2023 with an investment in a protein sequencing company, many of the same challenges persisted.

So what’s changed?

Two things, really.

First, the science. AI and advances in biotech tooling have compressed development cycles dramatically. Second, the founders. A new generation of technical builders is showing up, bringing a new perspective to long-stuck problems. 

In less than a year, we’ve invested in four bio companies (more details to come when they are out of stealth):

• A platform for modeling intrinsically disordered proteins, which play critical roles in disease pathways including cancer, diabetes, and neurodegenerative disorders;
• A phage technology platform targeting antibiotic-resistant infections;
• An AI-driven cell design company building cells with desired behaviors from the ground up; and,
• A company mapping the immune system to create a foundational measurement layer for human health.

The common thread

On the surface, these startups span very different areas but underneath, there is something in common: the founder profile. A few traits stand out and these now form our north star that we align to when investing in bio:

• Deeply technical but not necessarily traditionally trained in biology or medicine. Able to learn quickly across disciplines and are often paired with a bio co-founder who helps fill that gap.
• An outsider perspective that’s only viable now because of AI. Models and tools finally exist to bring that perspective to bear at real scale, in the real world.
• Anchored by world-class scientific collaborators from academia or research labs. This is non-negotiable for us.
• Focus on commercializing existing research rather than making novel scientific breakthroughs – and finding creative paths to market: alternative regulatory routes, selling into research organizations first, building enabling platforms before going after therapeutics, etc.

Put simply: for us, this is about translating great science into real-world impact — not inventing the science itself. Biology is becoming dramatically more engineerable, not because the science got easy, but because AI and biotech tooling have unlocked new ways to build.

Why this feels like a Version One moment

This is all deeply aligned with how we’ve always invested.

We’ve long been drawn to mission-driven founders entering frontier markets before they’re consensus. Bio sits at a real intersection right now – deep science meeting AI – and we’re energized by founders building at that seam.

There’s a window here. And we want to be early to it.

One more thing we’re excited about: we’re launching a special vehicle, led by one of our former bio founders, to back the earliest biotinkerers — the ones still working through real scientific and technical risk. More on that soon.

We can officially say that we’re past bio-curious. We’re bio-bullish.

We’re excited to keep learning, writing, and sharing more as these companies come out of stealth. And if you’re building at the intersection of biology, AI, and real-world impact — we’d love to hear from you.