Juvenescence Raises a Further $100M to Invest in Therapies to Treat Aging
Jim Mellon and his allies are in fine form as they continue their quest to establish an industry focused on extending healthy human life spans by treating aging as a medical condition. They have brought in another $100M to Juvenescence, a company founded to make the formative investments needed to build an industry, backing biotech startups working on approaches to regeneration, rejuvenation, and slowing aging. While largely focused on small molecule drug development, of which senolytic treatments are to my eyes much more interesting than the other approaches taken to date, Juvenescence has funded groups like Lygenesis, working on delivery of organoid tissue as a regenerative therapy. It will be interesting to see what the Juvenescence principals choose to do with the funds from this present round.
Juvenescence, a life sciences company utilising expert drug developers and artificial intelligence experts to create therapeutics and technologies to treat diseases of aging and to increase human longevity, is pleased to announce the successful closure of its $100 million Series B round, including a total of $10 million from its founders and a further $10 million each from four cornerstone investors, including Grok Ventures, the investment company of Mike Cannon-Brookes (Atlassian cofounder), and Michael Spencer's private investment company, IPGL. This brings the total to $165 million that Juvenescence has raised in 18 months and speaks to the extraordinary opportunity as well as interest in developing therapeutics with the capacity to modify aging.
Juvenescence is creating a longevity ecosystem, with world class scientists, seasoned drug developers, machine learning experts and a strong team with financial acumen to navigate this emerging new biotech growth sector and to develop 12 therapeutic candidates within the field of healthy aging. "This has been such an exciting six months for Juvenescence. We have been able to add extraordinary people to the Juvenescence team who will bring our age modifying therapeutics to market. We have also augmented our team working on using machine learning for drug discovery and for drug development: culminating with closing on this $100 million Series B financing which provides us with sufficient working capital to progress many of our programs to their initial inflection points".