https://xitter.cf/t.co/f3lprY5S2e, Austin TX, venture capital/investing/venture philanthropy,conservation,Smiles and Laughter
Austin
Joined May 2007
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I'm grateful and humbled to be featured on one of the covers of this year’s Forbes 400 issue.
In my interview, I shared that Breyer Capital is especially energized by the intersection of AI and the life sciences. Healthcare is at an inflection point: scientific discovery is accelerating, yet the systems of care have not kept pace. The gap between what’s possible and what’s practiced is widening, and that dislocation represents one of the defining opportunities of our time.
One example of this transformation is OpenEvidence, which this week announced a $200 million financing at a $6 billion valuation led by Google Ventures. Open Evidence now supports over 15 million clinical consultations each month, empowering physicians with trusted, evidence-based insights from leading medical journals.
At Breyer Capital, we invest where science, computation, and care converge. Breakthroughs in AI, precision medicine, and data infrastructure are reshaping how healthcare is delivered, measured, and paid for. Our goal isn’t to optimize broken systems, but to help build new ones: rearchitecting the clinical stack, compressing biomedical time, and creating evidence frameworks that learn in real time.
Thank you to Forbes for the recognition, and to the extraordinary scientists, clinicians, and entrepreneurs who continue to show us what the future of health can look like.
Five years ago, Breyer Capital was proud to back @colossal in its inaugural $15 million seed financing. When @BenLamm and renowned Harvard geneticist @geochurch founded the company, their ambition to bring back the woolly mammoth captured the world's imagination.
But what excited us just as much was the potential for breakthroughs in genomics, gene editing, and computational biology to transform conservation and advance biotechnology more broadly. Since that first investment, it has been remarkable to watch Ben and the Colossal team turn an extraordinarily ambitious vision into tangible scientific progress.
In just five years, Colossal has pioneered genetically engineered woolly mice and dire wolves, and cloned critically endangered red wolves. Its work now extends to the dodo, Tasmanian tiger, and numerous endangered species, including a new partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to preserve genetic material from thousands of threatened and endangered species.
This week, Warhound, founded by Ben Lamm and Palmer Luckey, emerged from stealth. I'm excited to announce Breyer Capital's investment in Warhound and proud to continue supporting Ben and his team's remarkable work. It's gratifying to see technologies we believed in five years ago finding new applications in conservation, biotechnology, and now national security.
Honored and humbled to be included in @Forbes' 250 Greatest Living Optimists alongside so many visionary friends and colleagues.
I’ve long believed that optimism is fundamental to entrepreneurship and investing. It gives us the conviction to take the long view, back extraordinary people, and believe that tomorrow can be better than today.
My thanks to Forbes for this recognition and for celebrating those who are working to build a better future. #Forbes250
Absolutely wonderful @elonmusk
A remarkable legacy🙏 @MichaelDell @SusanDell
outstanding @JimDavis_UT
Human health is central to the future of UT and our mission. I’m proud to name Dr. Claudia Lucchinetti Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs and the UT Dell Medicine Health System. Claudia’s leadership will bring our strengths together in service to patients, Texans, and the future of health care.
Read more: utex.as/4ywXVQ8
Amazing @biohub
BREAKING: The U.S. government, Google, Meta & Zuckerberg-backed @biohub are launching a $1.8B push to build the data layer for AI biology.
The goal is to create the largest open, AI-ready biological dataset ever assembled, giving models the data needed to better predict how biology works & ultimately help treat disease.
The coalition is massive:
› Biohub committed $500M
› DOE is investing $500M+ across measurement, modeling & compute
› NIH is bringing $500M+ of federally funded datasets & repositories
› Meta, Google DeepMind & @IsomorphicLabs are jointly investing another $300M
This is effectively an infrastructure buildout for AI biology.
Instead of just building bigger models, they’re attacking one of the biggest bottlenecks in biology AI today, generating standardized, high-quality biological data at massive scale & making it openly available to researchers.
$1.8B committed to turning biology into something AI can increasingly model, predict & engineer.
Today @AMD announced it will acquire @theworldlabs, with @drfeifei joining as chief scientist.
It's been wonderful working with Fei-Fei at @StanfordHAI, the institute she co-founded, where I have served on the advisory council since inception.
ImageNet taught machines to see; World Labs asked how they might understand the three-dimensional world they see.
We at Breyer Capital are grateful to have been part of the earliest investor group in the seed.
She could not have found a better home. My good friend @LisaSu rebuilt AMD on engineering discipline and long-horizon bets, and this is another: the hardware for the next era of AI will be designed alongside the people building the models.
Congratulations Fei-Fei and Lisa.
Such a proud seed investor @theworldlabs
We’re excited to announce a definitive agreement to acquire @theworldlabs, bringing a world-class team of researchers and model experts to AMD who will help shape future AI infrastructure and strengthen the open AI ecosystem.
More on the news: bit.ly/4xOHT2Q
We look forward to welcoming @drfeifei and the World Labs team to AMD!
Wonderful @OpenEvidence
Memorial Sloan Kettering opening its precision oncology data to physicians nationwide through OpenEvidence. Today's Forbes has the story.
@MSKCancerCenter has spent years building the world's most detailed map of which cancer mutations respond to which treatments. Until now, you had to be treated at MSK to benefit from it. Soon, an oncologist in a small practice in Montana will see the same evidence as a subspecialist in Manhattan, at the moment it matters, for the patient in front of them.
More patients getting the right treatment the first time, wherever they live. Read full article here forbes.com/sites/innovationr…
Doug is a long-time colleague and extraordinary at what he does, and this was a terrific conversation.
Toward the end of the interview, he recalled hearing me turn down a company and said, “The founders are going to walk away from this thinking they won the lottery. I was always an admirer of how he (Jim) could do that.”
I’ve always tried to pass on companies with as much grace and thoughtfulness as possible, as well as give the reasons why. The founders we meet are so often universally high-quality people taking on something incredibly difficult. Like many of the very best Venture Capitalists, we have always felt that they deserve respect, whether or not we ultimately invest.
There’s also an important element of humility in saying no. Investors get things wrong, companies evolve, and circumstances change. If I missed something, I always want to be able to revisit the conversation with a founder and, hopefully, find a way to work together down the road. This has occurred many times, and with some of our best deals.
My conversation with @dougleone, partner at @sequoia.
0:00 How to Dominate for Decades
3:17 Turning Fear Into a Tailwind
5:40 Immigrant Drive, Hard Work & the Beach Club
12:19 Simplifying Life & Choosing Discomfort
14:37 The Homeless Sequoia Partner With No Plan B
16:49 Stepping Down, Coming Back & Starting Over
20:04 Why AI Is Different From Every Previous Technology Shift
22:13 Doug's Three Investment Heuristics
23:52 The Cost of Selling Great Companies Too Early
25:39 Helping Founders Turn Products Into Businesses
28:28 David Vélez, Nubank & the Psychology of Founder Support
32:25 Why Founders Must Remain the Soul of the Company
36:13 Torturing Yourself Into Greatness
39:57 Don Valentine, Succession & the Sequoia School of Hard Knocks
44:28 Staying Grounded & Developing a Sniffer for People
47:46 Hypercompetitive With a Heart of Gold
50:13 Fred Luddy, Israeli Founders & Radical Directness
52:28 Trust Is the Accelerant of Business
59:57 Starting From Zero & Hunting for the Next Great Founder
1:05:59 Architect Your Board Like Your Product
1:10:24 Truth, Disagreement & the Art of Difficult Feedback
1:13:43 Humanity, Introversion & the Value of Relationships
1:18:18 What Doug Learned From Michael Moritz
Includes paid partnerships.
Jon and Jas: wonderfully said Jon @blackstone
Jon Gray reveals his real worry is not rogue employees but that Blackstone's own system stamps out the creative spark that landed the CoreWeave deal, crediting Jas Khaira who heads their tech investing arm
"I think the balance is you want them to be as entrepreneurial as possible, but recognize we have a system."
"And sometimes maybe the system goes too far."
"I mean, people are always worried that as you get bigger, that you're going to have people doing things that are more rogue. You're going to lose control."
"Oddly to me, because I think we have such a good system, I worry that we stamp out the entrepreneurial spirit."
"Because as you get bigger and bigger, that slightly different person who's very creative, who thinks about the world, we came up with some very interesting financing transactions."
"Jas Khaira, who runs our technology investing area, came up with this amazing way to finance CoreWeave, this Neocloud business, where we ended up giving them $11 billion, private company, former crypto business, but figured out that their contracts with Microsoft were super valuable, and we could finance these things."
Proud seed investor @colossal
BREAKING: Inside $12 Billion @colossal Biosciences + Colossal Spinout 'Astromech' Announces $20M Raise at $3.8 Billion
Woolly Mice, Dire Wolves, & AI-Driven Biotech
"We are one of the most undervalued companies in the world."
"[AI x Biotech] is truly exploding. You're gonna see this Precambrian explosion of new drugs & new therapies that all come from AI-assisted drug design & discovery."
Co-Founder & CEO @BenLamm
Up to 50% of all biodiversity is forecast to be lost in the next 25 years. Asian elephants get cancer at 2% to 3%, humans at 24% to 25%. That gap is the thesis behind both companies.
Colossal has raised $635M in total to date. CEO Lamm says each round was 2X oversubscribed, including a most recent round planned for $200M that closed at $400M. Six target species, 260-plus employees, 55,000 sqft Texas HQ, & no animal has ever been sold.
Astromech is the AI-driven predictive biology startup spun out of Colossal that aims to forecast how biological systems, evolution, & diseases will change over time. Astromech has raised $60M total. $30M in 2025, a $10.5M extension reported in April, & now $20M led by Bob Nelsen with Peak 6, NeoGenesis Capital, Builders VC, & CAZ Investments. Valuation moved from $2B in March to $3.8B today. Co-founded by Lamm & George Church.
On the spinouts: "When new ideas & technologies arise that have other applications outside of de-extinction & species preservation, we spin them out or license the technology so our core teams can focus on Colossal's mission."
Colossal Spinouts:
› Form Bio, 2022, computational life sciences platform
› Breaking, plastic degradation using Colossal bioengineering
› Astromech, 2026, evolutionary AI
› Artificial wombs, next in line, tech expected ready in ~2027, with human fertility applications
We cover:
› Astromech, AI for Biology
› Gene drives, screwworm, and a half trillion dollar invasive species market
› Woolly mice from edit design to live animals in 30 days
› The Viagen acquisition and 80% cloning efficiency
› Artificial wombs, IVF, & germline applications
› $635M raised & why every round was oversubscribed
› The no-go list on human and primate work
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Ben Lamm, Co-Founder & CEO at Colossal Biosciences
(01:07) Inside Colossal's De-Extinction Lab
(05:07) Every wall in this lab has a purpose
(06:02) The AI idea that could save the planet
(08:09) What Colossal is building next
(08:28) Revealing Colossal's woolly mice
(10:49) Wild requests they get every day
(13:35) Colossal's business model
(15:07) How Colossal raised $635 million
(20:17) How AI is converging with Biotech
(22:44) How ancient DNA actually gets to the lab
(26:24) The real stats behind Mass Extinction
(32:07) Will their animals ever live in the wild?
(34:58) Building this company with no background in Biology
(41:44) Choosing their earliest backers
(52:51) Why they refuse to work on Humans
(58:07) Are they secretly working on Aliens?
At Breyer Capital, we look for platform technologies that collapse the distance between fundamental discovery and real clinical impact.
Today, most biomedical AI remains constrained by fragmented datasets and single-institution cohorts that learn site-specific artifacts rather than durable biology. To move medicine from describing syndromes to understanding mechanisms, we have to start with the data layer.
NetworkBio announced $50M today to build that foundation. Breyer Capital led the first institutional round and has invested in every round since.
Our thesis on why Network Bio represents an irreproducible advantage in biomedical AI:
- Aggregating Multimodal Ground Truth: By creating the United States Biobank across top medical centers, Network links tissue, blood, molecular profiles, and longitudinal EHR outcomes across 500K+ patients.
- The "Virtual Biopsy" Platform: Tissue reveals the disease microenvironment; blood provides accessible scale. Using cfRNA foundation models built with @nvidia, Network Bio is mapping local tissue biology into scalable, non-invasive liquid biomarkers.
- Immediate Translational Velocity: Validated by peer-reviewed oncology detection data and a $30M + co-development partnership with a Fortune 100 healthcare leader, Network is committed to bending the arc of medicine towards molecular characterization and precision.
Proud to back the Network Bio team as they build the backbone for mechanistic understanding of human disease.
