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Healthtech Startups Score Big Fundraises

The pandemic saw a flurry of investment in biotech startups but the past three years have seen shrinking investments in the sector.

Photo of a Neko Health clinic
Photo via Neko Health

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Aside from a few Elon Musk potshots, Sam Altman’s had a pretty good week.

First, the OpenAI CEO got to trumpet a new AI infrastructure investment project. And then a biotech company he backs scored a major fundraise a couple days later. Retro Biosciences announced it has raised $1 billion to further its research into anti-aging technology. The very same day, Neko, a healthtech startup cofounded by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, announced a $260 million fundraise to build clinics in the US.

Age Before Funding

The pandemic saw a flurry of investment in biotech startups (can you guess why?) but, according to a recent article in Nature, the past three years have seen shrinking investments in the sector. That is, until last year, when life seemed to return to biotech — although Nature noted that there was something of a gap, with big companies working on well-established areas of research attracting chunky funding rounds while smaller, more innovative startups working on more unproven science were left vacuuming up the crumbs. 

In that sense, Retro Biosciences has bucked the trend, though it probably helped that it has Altman’s name attached and the company leans heavily on the idea that it will use AI (funnily enough, OpenAI’s AI) to find treatments to halt or even reverse the aging process: 

  • The Financial Times reports that Retro Biosciences is putting its $1 billion in fresh cash towards getting three drugs to trial, including one designed to treat Alzheimer’s. “The line we’re drawing in the sand is, damn it, we’re going to have our first drug out in the 2020s,” Sandro Salsano, a financier leading the fundraise who has also joined Retro Bioscience’s board, told the FT.
  • Drug discovery has been touted as one of the best, most tangibly useful, applications of AI. Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google AI division DeepMind as well as Isomorphic labs, an Alphabet-owned AI drug discovery company, told Davos earlier this week: “We’ll hopefully have some AI-designed drugs in clinical trials by the end of the year.”

Scanning for Demand: Daniel Ek’s Neko is slightly less buzzy, specializing in full-body scans to provide preventative health data. So far, it has started clinics in its home city of Stockholm and in London, and CEO Hjalmar Nilsonne told TechCrunch the company has scanned 10,000 people and has a waiting list of 100,000. “It’s very clear that there’s incredible demand for a different way of thinking about health care,” Nilsonne told TechCrunch.