Mohammad Islam, Racquel Bracken, Julie Grant, and Dan Estes are among Silicon Valley’s top young venture capitalists investing in biotech.Shayanne Gal/Business Insider
Putting millions of dollars into bold new technologies can be a delicate business when lives hang in the balance. But every day some of the sharpest minds in Silicon Valley make big bets on tools and techniques that promise to cure disease, help fix the food system, and even prolong life.
Biotech is one of the hottest sectors for venture-capital funds right now.
In January, startup accelerator Y Combinator announced details of its plan to launch a new biotech track focused on advances in the life sciences. Some of the biggest recent buzz in the sector has centered on new ways of tackling cancer using patients’ own immune systems, fresh therapies built on gene-editing tools like CRISPR, and potentially revolutionary techniques for making meat without factory farming.
“We like to back things that are unlike anything we’ve ever seen before,” said Mohammad Islam, a principal at VC firm DFJ, which recently invested in Memphis Meats — one of the startups aiming to make real meat from animal cells.
In addition to the venture capitalists on this list, Business Insider spoke with entrepreneurs and CEOs to gauge the top young biotech stars. These are the most interesting and ambitious biotech investors, age 40 and under, on the West Coast:
Laura Deming, one of the youngest fund managers in the US, wants to create an antidote to aging.
Title: Founder, Longevity Fund
Age: 24
Laura Deming has defied the limits of age from the time she was 12. That’s when she moved halfway around the world to study under Cynthia Kenyon, a renowned molecular biologist who specializes in the genetics of aging.
Deming began her college education at MIT at age 14. The prodigy dropped out to pursue a career developing antiaging technology through Peter Thiel’s fellowship program.
Now, Deming has founded her own $22 million venture firm, the Longevity Fund, as well as a startup accelerator in an effort to spur entrepreneurs hunting down treatments for aging-related diseases. Among the fund’s investments are Alexo Therapeutics, a startup developing cancer therapies, and Unity Biotechnology, an antiaging drug company.
An engineer by training, Mohammad Islam left a job with the CIA to fund big ideas “unlike anything we’ve seen before.”
Title: Principal, DFJ
Age: 28
Before becoming a principal at the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm DFJ, Mohammad Islam used his background in engineering to work on the technical team of In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s VC arm.
At DFJ, Islam focuses on “frontier technologies” like machine intelligence and biotechnology — arenas where startups would essentially be creating brand-new markets for their goods.
He’s especially excited about companies like Memphis Meats, which aims to get its first cell-based duck and chicken products in restaurants by year’s end, and Zymergen, a robot-powered factory that turns bacteria into new materials.
Blake Byers is an engineer, scientist, and entrepreneur who has been leading investments at Alphabet’s venture arm GV since 2010.
Title: General partner, GV
Age: 33
Blake Byers, the son of famed venture capitalist Brook Byers, started doing biomedical research as a high-school student at Stanford University. His research spanned biomedical engineering, stem cells, Parkinson’s disease modeling, and more, resulting in multiple journal papers and patents.
Byers continued running research projects throughout his academic training and his early years working at GV (formerly Google Ventures).
As an investor, Byers partners with founders of life science and digital health companies — such as Collective Health, a startup offering tech-savvy tools for managing health benefits, and genetics-testing company 23andMe — to create a global health impact.
He also helped incubate a new cell-therapy company, Pact Pharma, which is working on technology that reprograms a cancer patient’s immune system cells to attack the disease. Byers has raised over $125 million for the company while serving as interim CEO. Pact will announce a new CEO later this year.
Julie Grant is a triple threat in business and science, with degrees from Stanford, Cambridge, and Yale. She uses her academic expertise to help startups translate concepts into real products.
Title: West Coast Partner, Canaan
Age: 35
Julie Grant got her start in the life sciences during her freshman year in college while interning in a professor’s organic chemistry lab. Since then, she’s nabbed degrees in science and business from Stanford, Cambridge, and Yale. Grant also spent six years at pharmaceutical giant Genentech, where she worked on a pancreatic-cancer drug and learned the ropes of the federal drug-approval process.
“I love being able to take blue sky, completely novel research from universities and translate that into something that could be useful for society. That’s my true north,” Grant told Business Insider.
Since joining health and technology venture-capital firm Canaan as a partner in 2013, Grant has backed promising startups including Protagonist Therapeutics, which aims to create new drugs for autoimmune disorders like inflammatory bowel disease, and Glooko, which makes an app to help manage diabetes.
An engineering junkie from his early days, Benjamin Tseng raised $60 million for a startup and now links investors with pioneering companies in China.
Title: Principal, 1955 Capital
Age: 32
Benjamin Tseng is a principal at venture-capital firm 1955 Capital, where he focuses on advanced technologies in energy, healthcare, food, agriculture, and new manufacturing models.
Tseng got into venture somewhat accidentally, when what he thought was an informational interview with international venture fund DCM turned out to be a real one.
“I convinced DCM to take a chance on me,” Tseng told Business Insider.
Tseng spent four years at the firm before joining a messaging startup he helped seed called Yik Yak, which raised more than $60 million in VC funding under his helm.
Tseng is interested in the potential for emerging technologies to help feed the planet and spot disease early. He’s also focused on healthcare and renewable energy.
His firm has a particular emphasis on connecting startups in North America and Europe with market opportunities in China, which has some of the largest global demand for new products focused on health and clean tech.
Dylan Morris takes his experience with his own diagnostic startup and applies it to support other companies attempting to cure disease.
Title: Bioengineering lead, CRV
Age: 40
When he graduated from Harvard with a degree in computer science, Dylan Morris was looking for a place to have an influence on the world. Shortly after starting graduate school at Caltech, he found venture capital.
His VC career started at Innovation Endeavors, a tech-centric firm that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt cofounded in 2010. But two years later, when George Zachary, a partner at venture-capital firm CRV, had a scare with cancer, he picked Morris to head up the firm’s leap into bioengineering.
Morris believes we can use what we’ve learned about cancer to treat — and eventually cure — a handful of other diseases, including those that occur when the body’s immune system begins attacking itself or other parts of the body, also known as autoimmune diseases.
“Taking what we’ve learned about cancer and applying it to autoimmune, neurodegenerative, and infectious diseases — that’s where we’re headed,” Morris told Business Insider. “Our immune system is the center in our bodies that keeps disease at bay and what we’re learning about it is too exciting for words.”
John Melas-Kyriazi is helping one of the top investment firms in Silicon Valley make winning bets in the biotech sphere.
Title: Investor, Spark Capital
Age: 29
With a portfolio that includes Twitter, Slack, Cruise, and Oculus VR, Spark Capital has earned its reputation for taking risks on product visionaries. Tech investing wunderkind John Melas-Kyriazi leads the firm’s investments in companies using life sciences and software to tackle biotech-adjacent problems like food security and climate change.
He works closely with the founding teams at Full Harvest, a platform that connects food and beverage companies with farms to buy surplus and imperfect produce, and Wild Type, which is working on technologies that would allow any meat to be cultured in a lab.
Melas-Kyriazi, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Stanford University before dropping out as a doctoral candidate, was previously one of the first employees at StartX, a startup accelerator for entrepreneurs affiliated with the top-ranked university.
Racquel Bracken deferred med school for a drug-development consulting gig. Now she’s backing companies that use the body to heal itself.
Title: Vice President, Venrock
Age: 35
After working in a molecular biology lab at Harvard, the Texas native Racquel Bracken met a fork in the road. She could either go to medical school, as many of her colleagues did, or she could explore the business side of the medical system. She opted for the latter, and has never looked back.
As a vice president at Venrock, Bracken sits on the board of Cyteir Therapeutics, which aims to treat cancer and autoimmune diseases using emerging science on how DNA repairs itself. She’s also a board observer at Inscripta, a gene-editing company that recently nabbed its first patent for a CRISPR protein, which can be used to tweak genes within the cells of mammals and microbes.
Dan Estes, another individual on this list, says Bracken is “one of the most energetic, thoughtful, and insightful VCs around.”
When deciding whether to back a startup, “I consider whether your therapeutic can have a large, demonstrable effect on the population,” Bracken told Business Insider. “Can you be best in class? First in class? Those are fundamental tenets that I look for.”
Michael Dixon supports entrepreneurs bringing together the field of medicine and enterprise software to make healthcare less messy.
Title: Partner, Sequoia Capital
Age: 34
Michael Dixon is interested in what he calls the “big, tectonic plate shifts” happening in the commercialization of healthcare.
He works with companies at the intersection of healthcare and enterprise software, including AirStrip Technologies, a medical software company that delivers real-time, critical patient data to their mobile devices, and Clover Health, a new kind of insurance provider that’s focused on driving down costs and improving outcomes for elderly and low-income patients.
Dixon also sits on the boards of Comprehend, Cortexyme, Health Catalyst, Implantable Provider Group (IPG), Percolate, and Stemcentrx.
Before joining Sequoia, Dixon earned his degree in finance and accounting from Boston College and worked as an associate at Fidelity Management & Research Co.
Renata Quintini invests in ambitious startups that aim to help us to not only live longer but live well.
Title: Partner, Lux Capital
Age: 39
Renata Quintini believes in leveraging technology to improve quality of life. She partners with entrepreneurs whose ideas aim to transform the future of humanity.
“Technology has been giving humans superpowers,” Quintini told Business Insider. “As we continue to better understanding (through gene sequencing and other diagnostics), modify (through gene editing), and create biology (through synthetic bio), we are unlocking these superpowers and pushing the boundaries of what is possible, both in terms of our life span and quality of life.”
At Lux Capital, she’s invested in a brain-nutrition company that’s still in stealth, as well as RDMD, which is accelerating treatments for patients with rare disease.
Before becoming a venture capitalist, Quintini left her hometown of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to earn her business degree at Stanford University. She also worked as an investment manager at Stanford’s endowment, which invests in dozens of private equity and venture funds.
Francisco Gimenez uses his background in medicine and data to get us closer to a future in which drugs are living entities.
Title: Resident Data Scientist, 8VC
Age: 31
Francisco Gimenez, the resident data scientist at biotech-focused venture-capital firm 8VC, made his first moves in the industry by showing up to meetings he wasn’t invited to.
A recent Stanford grad, Gimenez had already amassed a few years’ venture experience at San Francisco-based VC firm Formation 8 when he jumped to a biotech-focused offshoot of the firm called 8VC. As it began to take shape, Gimenez made an effort to learn as much as he could as quickly as possible — starting with showing up to random internal gatherings where he could learn what the firm needed.
Today, Gimenez focuses on the firm’s investments in biotech and artificial intelligence.
He’s particularly excited about a handful of portfolio startups, including Synthego, which sells CRISPR kits for scientists experimenting with the tool; Hexagon, a drug-discovery company; and Senti, which is focused on creating programmable seek-and-destroy cells that could help treat disease.
“So far we’ve been using chemistry to hijack the mechanisms of biology,” Gimenez told Business Insider. “But soon ideally, we should be using living entities to modulate our internal living organism.
A partner at one of Silicon Valley’s leading biotech hubs, Jun Axup picks the startups that get $250,000 and four months of hands-on training from accelerator IndieBio.
Title: Scientific Director and Partner, IndieBio
Age: 31
Armed with doctorate degrees in chemical biology and immuno-oncology (a research approach that aims to use the body’s own immune system to fight cancer), Jun Axup built two of her own startups — MYi Diagnostics and Biochemies — and worked as a scientist in several others. She left that side of the startup world to help others succeed.
She’s now a partner at leading biotech hub IndieBio, which provides funding and resources to biotech startups working on everything from cultured meat to non-opioid painkillers.
Axup has her eye on two main industries: food and disease diagnosis.
“We’ve come so far in our understanding of the molecular makeup of foods and how we can use that to address global problems like climate change,” Axup told Business Insider.
Graham Walmsley signed one of the largest Series A financing deals in biotech history.
Title: Principal, Versant Ventures
Age: 29
Less than six months into his career at San Francisco-based venture firm Versant, Graham Walmsley signed off on one of the largest Series A financing deals in biotech history. That deal, completed in 2016, launched BlueRock Therapeutics, a cell-therapy company formed in partnership with pharmaceutical giant Bayer.
Today, Walmsley is a principal at Versant, where he specializes in healthcare and biotech investing. He recently led the firm’s investment in a clinical-stage therapeutics company focused on treating non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), which is poised to be a significant burden on the US healthcare system due to the growing number of patients with the disease.
Walmsley is also the head of business development at two other therapeutics companies in Versant’s portfolio, both of which are based in San Diego — Jecure, which uses traditional drug development approaches to treat NASH, and Pipeline, which aims to treat Multiple Sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases by rebuilding the protective sheaths surrounding the nerves in the brain and spinal cord.
Jennifer Kaehms, who earned her degree in bioengineering, helps recruit college students to become the top VCs of tomorrow.
Title: Associate, Canvas Ventures
Age: 26
At Canvas Ventures, Jennifer Kaehms finds ambitious companies focused on digital health, as well as software, artificial intelligence, and consumer tech.
But it’s other activities that make Kaehms a standout venture capitalist. She oversees the firm’s liaison programs at Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. Students at these top-ranked colleges sit in on partner meetings, organize events for the firm, and develop thesis areas around tech investing — an unparalleled opportunity.
Participants often go on to work at venture-capital firms or startups, according to Kaehms.
After earning her degree in bioengineering from University of California, San Diego, she moved to Silicon Valley to set up a hacker house focused on artificial intelligence and hardware companies. There she learned how to build companies.
On a whim, she sent a cold email to Rebecca Lynn, a former chemical engineer and cofounder of Canvas Ventures, and wound up with a job.
Zal Bilimoria spent 10 years as a product manager at Microsoft, Google, Netflix, and LinkedIn before launching his own venture fund.
Title: Managing partner, Refactor Capital
Age: 36
Zal Bilimoria may be one of the most qualified operators in Silicon Valley. The Wharton School graduate spent 10 years building features and products at Microsoft, Google, Netflix, and LinkedIn, before joining top venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.
As a partner who helped launch the firm’s Bio Fund, one of the first specialized funds to emerge from Andreessen, Bilimoria sourced deals at the intersection of biology and engineering. He doubled down on his investment thesis with the creation of a new firm, called Refactor Capital, which backs founders solving “fundamental human problems.”
“Marc Andreessen said in 2011 that ‘software is eating the world.’ We believe ‘biology is eating the world’; as in, literally everything around us is being re-thought and re-engineered using biology instead of pure chemistry,” Bilimoria told Business Insider.
He said he’s most excited about the “tremendous” opportunity for biotech to transform consumer and industrial applications outside healthcare — spanning the food we eat, the clothes we wear, and “the ingredients in almost every physical product we touch.”
Among Refractor’s investments are PathAI, an AI platform that aids doctors with cancer diagnostics and treatments, and Checkerspot, which uses fatty acids from algae to create outdoor recreation products like moisture-wicking fabrics and other materials.
Dan Estes is an adviser to therapeutics companies, and has his eye on startups creating treatments he can clearly envision in the clinic.
Frazier Healthcare Partners
Title: Partner, Frazier Healthcare Partners
Age: 38
Dan Estes has spent nearly a decade at healthcare and pharmaceutical venture firm Frazier Healthcare Partners, where he focuses on backing drug companies that treat everything from cancer and rare diseases to skin conditions.
Racquel Bracken, who nominated Estes, said he’s “a true partner to his teams and fellow investors — always adding value and providing helpful and strategic perspectives. He’s not afraid to roll up his sleeves and partner with the entrepreneurs he backs.”
At Frazier, Estes serves on the boards of four pharmaceutical startups, including Cirius Therapeutics, which is focused on tweaking the human metabolism to NASH, and Sierra Oncology, a cancer therapeutics company. He also recently led one of the earliest-stage investments ever signed at Frazier with a company that remains in stealth mode but aims to have a drug in the clinic within the next two years.
“The best investments are the ones where you can very clearly see where a physician would use this drug. Where you can answer the following questions: How would it help patients? What would that look like?” Frazier told Business Insider.
Vineeta Agarwala is a physician, scientist, and GV investor who oversees product management at buzzy startup Flatiron Health.
Title: Venture partner, GV and director of product management, Flatiron Health
Age: 31
Vineeta Agarwala’s résumé that reads as if it belongs to someone who’s been in the workforce longer than she’s been alive. Agarwala, a medical resident at Stanford University, juggles two other jobs as a venture partner at GV, Alphabet’s venture arm, and director of product management at Flatiron Health.
The cancer-technology company collects clinical data from cancer patients, like medications patients have taken and how they responded to them, to aid understanding of how cancer drugs work in the “real world.” Agarwala is leading the development of national databases that combine data for drug development and oncology research.
Agarwala kicked off her career with degrees from Stanford, Harvard Medical School, and MIT, where she studied the genetic basis of disease.
She previously worked as an early data scientist at health-tech startup Kyruus in Boston and a consultant for biotech clients at McKinsey & Co. in New York.
