There’s a new kind of biotech company coming out of Silicon Valley. Until now, this has happened mostly by chance, discovered by a few founders independently, without much coordination or explicit top down strategy. Some of the features of these companies are:
They have an expansive, positive mission centered around human biology. Perhaps it’s to live an additional 10 years of youthful life, to unlock new ways to have healthy children, or to dramatically improve our mental health. While sci-fi in its goals and highly technical in its execution, the mission generally has a relatable tie to a global societal challenge, like an aging population, demographic declines or a global “mental health crisis”.
They’re led by an exceptional, often proven founder. In many cases it’s a repeat entrepreneur who’s either already founded or been on the ground floor of a generational company. They bring the credibility, company building skills, and startup instincts needed to succeed in an extremely difficult, long-term, capital-intensive environment. These founders are looking for a transformative technology rather than the typically incremental advances of the industry.
There’s a smooth trajectory from treatment to enhancement: these companies begin by treating a condition that’s responsible for significant human disease and/or suffering, but expand to being available to functionally everyone. The ambition is often to ultimately offer a fundamentally new capability to humans, beyond anything we’ve seen devised by evolution.
They are centered around a novel and promising research kernel, combined with the best the startup playbook has to offer. That means a team composed of the best researchers in a new field with operators and engineers from the strongest startups, who help to set the pace and ambition level of the company bottom-up.
Even 5 years ago, it’d be hard to point to more than one or two instances of such a frontier bio company. Now there are ~5-10 established and it’s not uncommon to see them raise $100m from world-class investors for heavy R&D and a long-term mission. Working with Fred over the past few years I’ve been fortunate to get involved across the spectrum from investor to founder in several of these companies: New Limit (extending human healthspan), Conception (turning stem cells into human eggs) and Nudge (building whole brain interfaces for everyday life), and each has shown exciting technical progress as well as built strong teams and companies that can last.
Even with this progress, there hasn’t been a true breakout success in the category. There hasn’t been a company that has converted deep research into a product that helps millions of people, or become a real market success (e.g. $100B+ company). It will likely take years still for that to happen, but the traction is clear and there’s nothing I see as more worth dedicating a long-term mindset to. My goal is to help somewhere between 1-3 of these companies from idea to execution in the coming few years through investing and incubation.
Ultimately the most important factor in success is pairing a sufficiently compelling mission with a team that can execute over the long run. In effect, the mission motivates the best people to put an absolutely unreasonable amount of effort into the resulting companies. It also shapes not only their success as businesses but their impact on the broader culture.
I’m dispositionally drawn to a mission that has a focus on both reducing human suffering and enhancing the lives of already healthy people, ultimately including myself, friends and family. There’s something really powerful about being able to draw on each of these motivators, at different parts of the life cycle of the company. It dovetails nicely with what’s best for startups’ success more broadly - first you have to get your company to do *anything at all*, then do something incredibly important to a small group of people, and eventually for everyone.
In an age largely defined by progress in AI, I think progress in biotech, especially which comes to affect everyone positively (not just those with debilitating conditions) provides an excellent answer to “what all this AI progress is for”. AI leaders have begun to articulate this already, but there’s not nearly enough optimization pressure focused on actually building the projects nor enough active effort to apply AI to the domain in a meaningful way. Drawing more compute and research talent towards bio in the coming years can help resolve one of its core challenges - that of generally long timelines to solving technical problems and slow feedback loops.
What would a breakout success look like?
The oft-mentioned GLP-1s are a fitting recent example. It’s a public health success, meaningfully treating the societal challenge of obesity, it seems to have broad-ranging health benefits (against addiction, ..) outside of its label and to already ‘healthy’ people. They’ve produced $1T of value for a product that now practically everyone has heard of and changes the way we think about weight loss at a pretty deep, conceptual level. In an industry that often produces failures or only incremental progress, it’s important to recognize that outlier, step function improvements are possible and to shoot for them.
If we succeed, we should see outcomes rivaling and ultimately exceeding GLP-1s coming from frontier bio startups, as well as truly new scientific breakthroughs typically reserved for academic labs.
The products they build should feel like a mix of what we love about medicine and what we love about the best consumer products. Maybe it’ll have first saved the life of someone you care about from brain cancer but now it gives you a perfect night of sleep every night. Or be a breakthrough liver treatment until it's making you feel like you're 20 again at 50.
I’ve now seen what an excellent 0 to 1 trajectory looks like at Nudge and am eager to emulate it across the ecosystem. The confluence of talent required (executive, scientific, engineering, operational) to achieve that is so great that I don’t expect there to be many such opportunities worth pursuing, and I want to reserve attention for the few that meet the bar. The problems at this stage are as such constrained by human capital, and the potential more than justifies the effort. If you’re an exceptional founder, researcher, engineer or operator who wants to get involved in this ecosystem as it hits its stride, please reach out on X or email me at quintin@prometheus.com.
A list of the best examples to date: Nudge, New Limit, Neuralink, Kernel, Conception, Science Corp, Until Labs, Loyal, Retro
Thanks for feedback on drafts of this post to Fred Ehrsam, Matt Krisiloff, Lucas Harrington, Mackenzie Dion, Blake Byers, Milan Cvitkovic, Laura Deming, Dylan Field, Joanne Peng, and Celine Halioua
Thanks to Blake for the coinage of ‘Human Enhancement Company’