$25M Fund, 20 Companies, Zero Failures: A Biotech Investing Secret | Sergey Jakimov (3/4)

Intro - 00:00:06: Welcome to the Biotech Startups podcast by Excedr.

Join us as we speak with first-time founders, serial entrepreneurs, and experienced investors about the challenges and triumphs of running a biotech startup, from pre-seed to IPO, with your host, Jon Chee.

In our last episode, Sergey shared about his graduate years in Budapest, the leap from student life to founder, and how a single accelerator event led to his first startup at 22. If you missed it, check out part two.

n part three, Sergey shares how he and his founders decided to start a longevity-focused fund, why they believe the field needed fresh thinking, and how access to top universities and key opinion leaders helped them build a science-first investing model. He also discusses how a rare autoimmune illness changed how he sees biotech, why patient outcomes, not hype, should guide every investment, and how that approach shapes everything from portfolio design to supporting fundamental aging research.

Jon Chee - 00:01:23: And this is company number three now. When did you know it was time to get into investing, or were you investing the whole time?

Sergey Jakimov - 00:01:33: In my work, when I was helping others building stuff, very often, I didn't take the payroll. I took options. So I have accumulated quite a bit of those.

And in 2021, me and Gary and our third partner in the fund as well, we sat together. We're like, look. We spent—Gary was investing in the longevity field, longevity being a broad term. Right? But in the field of AI for drug discovery and the whole new era of biotech since 2016, 2017, he was deploying money. He made money in tech, and then he deployed as a business angel. He was, for example, one of the very early investors in AI for drug discovery in a company called Insilico Medicine, and Insilico is now $2 billion in valuation, you know? So, he kind of created the whole field for AI for drug discovery, pretty much. And he invested in, like, 2017 or 2018, something like that.

So we sat together. We're like, "Look. You can only do this much as a business angel anyway". We spent our whole career, or most of our career, in age-related diseases in one capacity or the other as investors, as founders. We basically grew up with the longevity space as the longevity space was spinning out of traditional biotech. So all the regenerational regenerative medicine, all the epigenetic reprogrammings of the world, et cetera, they were spinning out in their own bubble, which started off as a nothing about a separate industry, almost like a cult thing to a certain extent, like a system of thought, like an unconventional type of biotech.

So we grew up with that field, and we saw a lot of early capital being invested in that field and written off because it was invested in the holistic science and generalist science, which was never even destined to reach regulators, destined to reach specific drugs or specific age-related disease indications.

And in 2021, we were like, well, it's time to build a fund. And we kind of have the two variables that we needed for the fund, and that was one was deal access because we had relationships with all the academic institutions out there that were spinning out tech, really, in age-related diseases. And I'm talking traditional ones like the Berkeley's, the Harvard's, Stanford's of the world. We knew tech transfer departments out there. We knew key opinion leaders that were working there specifically, so we had access to early tech. We could look at the spinouts they were creating.

And then on the other hand, because we grew up with the industry, we also grew up with the KOLs, key opinion leaders in that industry. So we were able to put together, literally in a week's time, I think, the most recognized scientific advisory board in that field—from Nobel Prize winners to national stem cell program directors and longevity physicians, you name it. And we strategically picked these people so that they represent the institutions where we're sourcing as well as the areas of interest in which we are sourcing. Right?

So this is how the fund was started. We were like, look. A lot of capital was written off. People were investing in this "let's cure aging" type of stuff. But then in reality, what you had is you had two camps. Aging became a thing. Right? The whole "is aging a disease" became a thing.

Camp One said, "Let's cure aging, and then age-related diseases never happen. Like, you cure aging as a disease. You crack it as a disease. Cancer never happens, right? Because aging is solved. Alzheimer's never happens".

Camp Two, a very unpopular camp back in the day, said, "You still want to take the traditional biotech approach. You still want to take it disease by disease because you need to solve the full puzzle disease by disease".

And by solving this and by tangling in the advancements in the aging biology that we have now, pairing it with a traditional biotech paradigm, we can explore these new mechanisms of action. We can explore these new signaling pathways that we were ignoring before. We can have new targets with AI for drug discovery. And maybe through this new approach, or new era of approaches, of how to solve these age-related diseases, this is where we can actually crack them in a disease-modifying way.

We call it the disease-modifying way. And by doing this, you might understand aging. Like, by solving cancer in the disease-modifying way, by solving neurodegenerative diseases, this is how you understand what are the underlying mechanisms, and only then you can understand aging because aging is too much of a holistic process. It just happens to you when you just hang around. Like, now. Right now, your body is creating thousands of cancer cells as we speak, and your immune system is detecting these cancer cells and fighting them off. And this is the, like, this eternal battle that continues for your whole life. So, right now, metabolically, you age. Right? So where do you start? Are you sick, technically, because you age? Right? So is it a disease, or should we go piece by piece?

And we said we should go piece by piece. It was largely unpopular because we were a fund in the longevity space, and everyone expected us to invest in fighting aging versus fighting the diseases. But that is the pragmatic outlook on aging that we kept. And for us, longevity and investing in longevity is investing in prolonging health span and prolonging the years of healthy human performance, not lifespan. Lifespan is not important per se. Lifespan is just a consequence of health span, really. Plus, in order to live a longer life, you really have to have the life that is worth living longer to begin with. You should want to live it longer in terms of the quality and whatever perks you have.

So, yeah, this is how we started. It's a long answer, but this is how we started the whole fund story, our first fund. And, yeah, it kind of all took off from there.

Jon Chee - 00:07:15: Very cool. Man, I love the way you succinctly put it. It's like, you gotta have a life that you want to live. Like, why extend the life if the life is not worth living?

Sergey Jakimov - 00:07:26: It is a very philosophical industry, this one, by the way, because I get this question quite a lot. And the question is, like, "Why biotech?" Right? Because you need to be an absolute optimist to invest in biotech, honestly. The success rates are terrible. It's done. Right? I mean, your success rates are, like, 5% for the companies that quote, unquote, "make it," right, for you as an investor as well. And we invest early to mid-stage, so a ton of risk. The life cycle is horrendously long sometimes. It's a bit of a misconception, so we can get into that. It's a bit of a myth. But people think that if you're a biotech investor, you need to be with the company for, like, ten years. So tremendous amount of risk, hugely long life cycle, very low success rate, and this small amount of capital needed, not involved, but needed to actually create something because clinical work is notoriously expensive.

And the only reason why you should really do this, and why I still think that this industry is—and longevity industry specifically is the best one out there—I do apologize in front of all the other industries right now, but I do think that way. Well, not the best one, but the most important one. And that is because it deals with an issue that everyone shares. I'm not being dramatic in saying aging. Okay. We age. Fair enough. But it's the issue of premature death. It's the issue of really dying or having an increasing chance of dying from something at the age of, like, 60 or 65 or whatever. When you have not exhausted, technically exhausted, your theoretical healthy years of life and healthy performance years, but you got knocked out by something that appeared seemingly out of nowhere, or very often not out of nowhere, but as a result of your lifestyle choices and a bunch of other genetic factors, but mostly 90% lifestyle choices, actually, which is interesting. And the issue of premature death is the one that we all share, and nothing else matters, really.

Like, this is a very stupid example, but it is what it is. If you die, all your crypto doesn't make sense. All your sustainability doesn't make sense. Right? All your community work or whatever you're doing and enjoying doesn't make sense. You have not solved the major existential issue or the major existential threat that you have. And we are in the industry that deals with that threat and tries to somehow—I won't say eliminate it—but at least prevent it or make us more equipped dealing with it in all the shapes and forms that it comes.

Jon Chee - 00:10:04: I feel the exact same way. The way you're describing that is a lot of the time, at Excedr, we're in equipment leasing. And when I talk to my other colleagues in credit, they're like, "Why are you in the sciences? There's plenty of financeable assets that are not in science." And I was like, "Aren't you limiting yourself?" And, also, isn't that just, like, exactly what you just described? And it's like, but for me and for Excedr—I'll speak for us—it's like, it is the fight worth fighting. It is what gets you out of bed. At least it gets me out of bed.

Sergey Jakimov - 00:10:39: And you're enabling something important.

Jon Chee - 00:10:42: Yeah. Because the way you described it is, like, everything else is moot.

Sergey Jakimov - 00:10:46: If you suffer from premature death. Like, nothing else matters, and no one wants that. Most people do not want premature death. Although, as surprising as it sounds, people do not want this, but they do not really acknowledge the thing that they're talking about. That one is interesting. So we do not acknowledge our mortality. You do kind of know that or you do kind of feel that. You know that you're going to die, that it is finite. All this is finite. Right? It's all temporary, pretty much. Like, all things in life are temporary. Right? The health, the sickness, being poor, being rich, everything is temporary. And life is as well as we speak right now.

The interesting part is we do not really acknowledge our mortality. We know it functionally, but it's not that you wake up in the morning with the thought of a mortal, right? It doesn't work that way. Yeah. And there was this one semi-scientific experiment, which demonstrated that. Whenever you think about yourself in 20 years' time, or somewhere like a future Jon, future Sergey, the area of our brain that lights up and activates is the area that we use to think about other individuals. So you do not associate really yourself with you plus 20 years in the future. So it is very hard to be kind to yourself in the future. And this is what makes it so freaking hard to do anything good for you long term. As dumb as it sounds, as surprising as it sounds, it is what it is.

It is why it is very hard to commit to lifestyle practices because all the lifestyle practices have a compounded effect. They don't really have an immediate effect. So you really need to do sports every day for 20 years not to die from a heart attack in 40 years. Right? What sort of reasoning timeline is even that? Right? So for a person that lives in bursts of satisfying short-term cravings, which is, "I want that car. I want that house. I want that meal. I want that this or that," or "I need to walk my dog," type of tasks, thinking about something in 20 years' time, it's like, what the—there's no ramp for that. So it is notoriously hard.

Interestingly enough, one of the kind of smaller evolutionary theories say that because of this thing, that we do not really acknowledge our mortality, we're capable of doing all the creative stuff and all the inventive stuff that we're doing versus animals, where animals are driven by their instincts, and instincts are driven by the need to survive. So wild animals are living like this. And us, we get up in the morning. We think about taking kids to school and maybe going to an art class or pursuing a career in philosophy or whatever. So we often think about survival every single day because we don't acknowledge the finite nature of things. It's a blessing and a curse at the same time. We can do all these great things, but at the same time, it is very hard for us to be kind to ourselves in the future through our future selves. It is partially also what our industry, the longevity industry, tries to deal with. Although I can say there is no shortcut to that at all.

Jon Chee - 00:14:19: You live by the sword, you die by the sword. It's the double-edged nature of it. And I think about just, like, my own personal habits now. I'm just, like, racking in my head. I'm like, "Damn, I need to step my game up," like, just having those conversations. Like, you were talking about this before we hit record. It's like, not forgetting to enjoy your life and just have good lifestyle habits goes a super long way. Like—

Sergey Jakimov - 00:14:47: There is this thing which is sometimes intertwined. So there is health span, and then there is a lifespan, and then you can add up joy span. Right? And joy span should absolutely be there as well because that is something that actually keeps you going because you need to enjoy things. You certainly don't need to prolong life for the sake of prolonging life.

Jon Chee - 00:15:03: I think some people do that, though, and that's the part that just gets gamified.

Sergey Jakimov - 00:15:08: They do. But in my reality—we can talk about this—but I might be a very bad example of, like, I'm very pragmatic about the longevity field. Right? And I think that prolonging life for the sake of prolonging life voids the purpose of life itself, like, voids the enjoyment of life. So the person that does that chronologically lived longer, maybe eventually, but joy-wise, never lived. Right? Unless you enjoy the whole process of prolonging life and, like, doing all these things. As with anything, you should not really get into extremes to create any impact on yourself specifically.

And then look. I mean, in my case, this is a bit ironic, to be honest. So I've seen this industry. I've seen the age-related disease industry as a founder, I saw it as an investor, and I did see the patient. So I'm a rare disease patient, technically, on the neurodegenerative side. So I cannot be cured as of now. The medical space does not know what to do with me. And at the age of, what, 28 going into 29, I've basically experienced on myself what it takes to lose function. It was a bizarre experience, so I got half paralyzed because of the neurodegenerative stuff. I have a very rare autoimmune condition type of thing. Works a bit like multiple sclerosis in terms of the mechanism of action, but the antibody that is involved is a bit different. One in 1.2 million or something like that, the incidence rate. So which makes me a rare disease patient, by a mile.

So I got extremely lucky getting out of it. I mean, you can't get out of it, but getting out of the first this major flare-up that I had, but that's not the point. The point is I got to try out what it takes to lose function at the age of not being 30. Right? And, like, I've seen stuff in my life, honestly. Like, with my first company, I've been to Nigeria. You know, I've been to the part of the Sahara where Al Qaeda is crossing the border. Like, I've seen fairly—I wouldn't say frightening things—but I've been in dodgy situations. Right? When I travel, this medical physical thing that happened to me, which was a rapid deterioration of essentially functions that you perceive as granted, because walking is granted. Right? Sensory functions are granted, and this is what I lost. That is the most frightening thing that has ever happened to me, period. Like, nothing comes even remotely close.

And what I can tell is that the prospect of losing anything material, of losing your house or your investment on the Robinhood account going dramatically down or, like, anything that we actually make a big deal out of, it's not worth a penny. You can't compare it to losing biological function that you perceive for granted and you used to have. And it was honestly the most frightening thing that ever happened.

And what I realized, I got into the hospital. I got into the ER, and they diagnosed me pretty quick. But the treatment that I got was a protocol—the treatment protocol that was basically 20 years old. Because with neurodegenerative conditions, your treatment, flare-up multiple sclerosis, whatever, pick any other, any sort of myelitis, right, any sort of spinal cord inflammation, whatever that is. The treatment protocol is a horse dose of corticosteroids. You shovel corticosteroids in the patient, especially with transverse myelitis, for example. It's the protocol. And then you drop the inflammation down, and then you see whether the functions are regained or not. And in my case, I guess I kind of got lucky because it came back gradually. I was able to rehab, but then the whole different ball game is how you get out of this long term and whatever.

But, yeah, 20-year-old protocol, and we fly reusable rockets to space. Right? And we create digital currencies, and we do all the bizarre stuff out there, and now we have AI substituting us in every single way, we still cannot treat diseases, and a lot of those. We still have very limited understanding of how these diseases work.

And the most interesting finding from the hospital ward, I was staying in a stroke unit, so they put me in a stroke unit because there was no neurological department. It was basically mostly people with stroke. Right? And I was the only one that was capable eventually capable of walking in that unit because everyone else was horizontal, as you might imagine. Nowhere in my—when I was staying there and then contemplating my life choices, being 28, 29—nowhere there there was a slot, metaphorically or directly speaking, a slot where you could put the money in, even if you had the money, and you would get better treatment or you would get better outcomes. So the game is you get what we have. Right? And that's it. That's the edge of the progress that you are getting. And if that edge is 20 old, well, bad luck.

So that was a bit of a revelation, to be completely honest with you. I can't say it shaped my version of the world tremendously, but it certainly introduced some adjustments to how we look now and how I look now at our work at the fund, for example, because nothing that we do at the fund, whenever we invest in something, whenever we support something, nothing that we do is aimed directly at getting a multiplier out of it as an investor. We only invest based on patient outcomes—potential patient outcomes. So if patient outcomes are somewhere there to be had, if that actually moves the needle in a specific disease category, a specific space, this is where we deploy the capital.

Interestingly enough, once you employ this logic, what happens is the good return on the investment financially for you as an investor is almost just a byproduct. Because if something yields patient outcomes, it is automatically valuable in the eyes of the pharma industry or whoever the buyer potential buyer is. So it's not important at all, interestingly enough. And this is what people miss with biotech investing quite a lot. You actually invest potentially into moving a needle in the quality of life of a certain patient group.

So that has shaped, I think, our view of the field quite significantly, and this is why we go after the disease-focused targets. We go disease by disease. And the second pillar that we go after is early-stage diagnostics. The first fund will be the least. The second fund is doing less diagnostics now. Early-stage diagnostics and what we call infrastructure. And infrastructure is everything that helps us to create drugs faster. So AI for drug discovery, all the new sequencing methods, single-cell protein sequencing, stuff like that. So everything that essentially enables us to generate more drug candidates and to push them through the laboratory and through testing faster. Because without that, we're still bound by this 10-year cycle for every single drug, and you cannot, like, you cannot move faster than the traffic, pretty much, and you need to figure out a way of how to hack the traffic.

But, yeah, I mean, I can talk endlessly about that. But, realistically, the biggest problem with biotech—not a problem, but it's more of a controversy or somewhat that still strikes me as a surprise—is that it is the most important industry out there, especially when we're talking age-related diseases, which people do not care about until they actually encounter said diseases. And then suddenly, it becomes the center of their universe because suddenly, they realize that walking can be taken away. Right? Any other physical function can be taken away. Cognitive abilities can be taken away, so they're also temporary. Although you're so used to your head being bright and ever so capable of pretty much any multitasking you throw at it, not going to happen all the time. So it is interesting sometimes how we ignore it.

Jon Chee - 00:23:08: Absolutely. And I think just from hearing your experience—and thanks for sharing that—it brought it home. Like, it really brought it home. It's like the saying, like, you never want to carry around an umbrella until it's actually raining on you. Right? It's kind of this thing, like, it only then becomes important when you're just drenched, and you're like, "Well, I wish I had addressed this earlier." And this is a weird human-condition conundrum that you've described, which is it really just puzzles me when people—I also agree that the life sciences is the most important industry and deserves way more credit and also way more capital inflows than—I love being in San Francisco where there's AI for this, AI for that. Like, I love that semiconductors are cool. AI is rad. I get it. It's cool. But, again, premature death, maybe I'm biased, but it trumps it all. If you're not around, it's all for naught.

And I think when I think about the industry, I think, you know, we've been kind of going through the turbulence of the last few years, but I—again, to be in biotech, you have to be an eternal optimist—so I see brighter days ahead of us. And it seems like the North Star for your guys' firm is firmly set. Like, when it comes to just, like, execution on this vision, can you just talk a little bit about just like, you were angel investing, and then now this is kind of more institutional. Like, how are the early years of, like, you're managing funds? You're building a firm.

Sergey Jakimov - 00:24:38: The first fund is done. So we built a firm. That firm has become, I think, a small household name for early-stage longevity investing. We built it out with our this very pragmatic take of what longevity is and what longevity is not. For us, longevity drug 1.0 is essentially something that has a mechanism of action that is translatable across several disease areas, not curing aging, quote, unquote, but, you know, something where we say, "Well, we've cracked the age-related diseases deep enough, so we understand that this thing or this specific mechanism of action can be used potentially with certain modification on a much larger patient population from cancer to something, like, insert the name of the disease". If we get to support something like that, that will be ultimately the job done for longevity in terms of, "We've done what we could," sort of thing.

So the first fund was $25 million US dollars. 20 companies invested. We built the fund in a very unconventional way so that it has a huge team. And the first fund spent every single dime of management fees on the team. So it has not paid anything in salaries to management partners. So we have essentially a deal team of seven people, plus the scientific advisory board, which is 14 people that plugs in on the latest stages of scientific due diligence that refers deals that kind of gets us allocations into most desirable deals out there, essentially, that we think are worth pursuing. So everything is built out or was built out with the only focus on scientific excellence. So filter hype, so filter the noise, stay with the signal. And that signal, you now have the impression about what it is, right, in terms of our vision of how to look at the sector. And this is what we did. We did not invest in hypey stuff out there. We did not invest in supplements. We just invested in hard science and age-related diseases.

You know, we're very proud to support several companies in oncology. We, for example, we did quite a lot of work with oncology in the field of antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs). So for those who are listening, ADCs are these things where you can piece together a drug molecule and an antibody and potentially create a multiple payload structure where you have multiple molecules around an antibody and the linker that kind of keeps the whole thing together. And then it gives you the target delivery because of the antibody and the kind of the payload release there. And then at the same time, it gives you this multifactorial effect of these multiple molecules acting specifically on the tumor and not just blasting the whole patient as you do with chemotherapy. Right? So there is much less systemic toxicity out there. So these solutions out there that are now—some of them are, like, five minutes to be a unicorn. Some of these first fund portfolio companies. So 20 companies, zero write-offs in almost three and a half years now, which is very untypical for biotech to begin with. So this is where the stake on Scientific DD really played out.

We've supported stuff like, for example, we're early investors in the company called AOA Diagnostics out of Boston. Most of our portfolio is US. And this is the group that has created the first blood-based ovarian cancer diagnostic for super early stage. Before that, ovarian cancer was not blood-diagnosed at all because the traditional kind of your Grail-type circulatory DNA approaches, they don't work with ovarian cancer. So they hacked their way through it and used, discovered the biomarkers that you can spot and created the assay to spot them much earlier. So now the whole thing is 200,000 women saved yearly around the globe if that gets, of course, worldwide adoption, but still things like that. I mean, we really just prioritized science. That's about it.

We're now into Fund Two, which we haven't had the first closing yet. So the first closing was actually in September. We will officially start investing as we now speak this month. Fund Two is pretty much the same thing that we were doing with Fund One. It's just larger. It's going to be $120 million. And same thing, early to mid-stage. This is where we're best at in terms of sourcing. This is where we're best at in terms of getting into allocations. And this is where people invite us as well because we're one of the groups out there that can conduct, I think, most qualified due diligence when it comes to science and specifically the regenerational part of longevity and tech in our field. So still the same focus, still the same kind of 20–23 companies in the portfolio type of target. Very much just a learning curve for us because we see that the most successful companies and the most well-developed now, once in the first fund, could have taken four times, five times more capital. So we're just doing the same thing just on a scale, essentially.

In parallel, we've created a satellite sister fund with a slightly different set of partners, which is called Ani.vc. And NI is dealing specifically with animal aging and animal health, which is a super interesting underexplored industry, very fast-growing, especially in the US. Interestingly enough, pet owners or pet parents, as they're now called, are much more willing to spend time and money on their pets sometimes versus spending it on themselves. Right? Because when your dog is sick, you'll do everything pretty much to make it better for the dog. And pet health is not that ignored, interestingly enough, as human health is often ignored quite paradoxically. So Ani.vc deals specifically with pet health. And then there's also a lot of translatability because in human pharma, most of the early-stage data comes from animal studies as well. I mean, they're not dogs, of course. These are mice usually or nonhuman primates. And nonhuman primates only for toxicity, not for efficacy, because efficacy is not ethical on nonhuman primates. But still a lot of translatability, a lot of cross-competence that we can provide with the experience that we have.

And then on top of that, we also built our own nonprofit, which is the Longevity Science Foundation (LSF). And that one is in the US, and it's in Miami. And it's basically a nonprofit that distributes non-dilutive, no-strings-attached grants to scientists that are working on fundamental research in the aging space and in the aging biology. Right? And for us, it's an ultimate tool, of course, to understand what's brewing, where, and what is in the very early and nascent stages of science. And not only to invest in it afterwards, but just to be on the edge of understanding what's happening with the field, but also as a tool to support scientists and academics working on fundamental problems in aging before these fundamental problems can be wrapped into a company. Because in order to build a company in longevity—this is, by the way, where a lot of capital was written off, interestingly enough —you need to learn how to talk the language of the industry and how to talk the language of the regulator, which means that you need to eventually arrive at some sort of a pipeline of assets. Like, you cannot just treat aging. FDA doesn't understand it. Right? It's not possible.

So whatever great regenerative medicine or whatever technology that you have, you're still bound to pick a disease target. And you'll need to do your animal work with specific endpoints related to that disease target. And you'll need to submit your investigator new drug or IND package with the FDA in order to be allowed into human trials. And for human trials, you need endpoints that you're going to measure, and aging doesn't have an endpoint. So one of the biggest issues for longevity startups and the longevity field per se was to get over this very sometimes narcissistic, un-to-innovative for them to understand type of narrative. So understanding that it's not that you're innovative and others are dumb as a tree. It's that FDA is there for a reason of safeguarding the safety of patients. And whatever fundamental tech you have, you really need to understand what is the shortest route and the most evident disease indication where you can prove this tech and then spin out from there with all the other indications, et cetera.

And some of the longevity companies were successful in that. Some of them died because they never really figured out a way of how to specialize. I'm not saying it's the right thing. Maybe we're losing some of the fundamental tech that could have been just holistically applied because of this disease focus of the FDA. But, really, you cannot regulate the space otherwise. Right? Because otherwise, it's going to be anarchy in terms of people doing whatever they want to do and all sorts of biases and zero standardization in terms of the endpoints and clinical trial designs, and you cannot allow that. So it is what it is as of now, but for us, it is still very important to support fundamental tech. And this is why we created the Longevity Science Foundation, which is a nonprofit.

So, yeah, quite a bit of things going on.

Jon Chee - 00:33:38: I was going to say, keeping you busy.

Sergey Jakimov - 00:33:41: It is.

Outro - 00:33:43: That's all for this episode of the Biotech Startups podcast featuring Sergey Jakimov. Join us next time for part four, where Sergey breaks down his fundraising from LPs, how a science-first thesis resonates with investors, and how co-invest access and a deep advisory bench support the platform. He'll also talk about his animal health fund, a nonprofit for fundamental aging research, why longevity needs evidence-based wins, and how pharma's urgency and patent cliffs shape the next few years.

If you enjoy the show, subscribe, leave a review, or share it with a friend. Thanks for listening. See you next time. The Biotech Startups podcast is produced by Excedr. Don't want to miss an episode? Search for the Biotech Startups podcast wherever you get your podcasts, and click subscribe. Excedr provides research labs with equipment leases on founder-friendly terms to support paths to exceptional outcomes. To learn more, visit our website, www.excedr.com. On behalf of the team here at Excedr, thanks for listening.

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