Newlimit, a biotech startup co-founded by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, has raised $130 million in the Series B funding round to bolster its ambition to slow or reverse the aging aspect of human beings.
The round, led by Kleiner Perkins, has been attended by notable return investors including Founders Fund, Dimension Capital, Angel Investor Elad Gil, CEO of Y Combinator, Garry Tan, and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison. statement.
New investors include former Github CEO Nat Friedman, former machine learning director at Apple, Daniel Gross and Khosla Ventures. The pay raise brings total startup funding to more than $170 million, following the $40 million Series A in 2023.
Turn it over and reverse it
Armstrong launched Newlimit over four years ago with former GV partner Blake Byers and stem cell researcher Jacob Kimmel.
The company is pursuing treatments that increase “healthy life expectancy” – in contrast to life expectancy, someone can live a healthy life – by reprogramming the human epigenome by changing the behavior of cells without changing the underlying DNA.
Newlimit explained that its mission is treating aging itself.
“Once once considered irreversible, the new science of epigenetic reprogramming shows that aging is indeed adaptable,” he said.
Newlimit is part of a growth movement among high-tech billionaires, ranging from software and fintech to the attractive prospects of biological immortality.
Billionaire’s obsession
This venture fits straight into the wave of Silicon Valley-backed longevity startups, wanting to solve the old problems that age with cutting-edge technology and a lot of money.
Openai CEO Sam Altman is one of the biggest funders of retro biological sciences in pursuit of age-reversal drugs. “We’re throwing weight behind another venture, Altos Labs, with the aim of reversing the disorders, disorders and obstacles that occur throughout our lives by restoring cell health and resilience through cell rejuvenation,” said Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.
Meanwhile, the Methosera Foundation is a nonprofit organization named after the longest living person in the Bible (he appears to have died at the age of 969), and has an ambitious goal of creating “90 The New 50” by 2030. PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel and Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin count among donors.
NewLimit’s strategy combines large-scale genomics with AI-driven analytics.
Its “discovery engine” tests thousands of reprogramming combinations on human cells and studies its effectiveness.
The company’s machine learning model helps you choose cellular adjustments to pursue in the next cycle, supporting the target experiment and avoiding random trial and error. I haven’t done human tests yet.
“We have built the technology to carry out the biggest experiments in this field,” the company said in a statement. “Our bet is that this combination of AI and scaled genomics can unleash the drugs that give each of us a healthier year.”
edit Sebastian Sinclair
