New Venture Firm Age1 Raises $35 Million Toward Early-Stage Longevity Fund

This is good news. Laura and Alex continue to identify and fund promising new startups in the longevity field, and while the $35 Million is pocket change in the biotech investment business, this help will drive the early-stage, longevity startup ecosystem.

Dr Alex Colville joins forces with Laura Deming to advance The Longevity Fund’s mission and lead investments in longevity science moonshots.

San Francisco-based age1, a venture capital firm catalyzing the next generation of founder-led longevity biotech companies, launched today to build a community of visionaries advancing new therapeutics, tools, and technologies targeting aging and age related disease.

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Laura Deming has written a post on her Longevity.VC website about her take on the industry and where its giong:

The longevity field will play out in 3 stages:

Pioneers (2013 - 2023): companies started in this decade show you can make financial returns building a longevity company, and get reasonable drug candidates to patients for specific age-related diseases.

Dominant players (2023 - 2050): I think we’ll see a wave of the best founders the field has ever seen. They’ll be prepared with the right resources to build the companies that 1) will go on to get the first approved longevity drugs (for age-related diseases, with ongoing plausibly successful trials for lifespan by the end of the decade) and 2) enter major biotech leagues ($10B+ valuations, enduring pharma co), and 3) scale to change how 50+ year olds plan their time and energy.

Generic players (2050+): developing drugs for longevity will feel as obvious and mainstream as developing drugs for cancer. The field will receive substantially more public and private funding. Large pharma companies will have teams working solely on longevity. A few of the largest companies, with drugs on the market, will be companies dedicated to increasing human longevity and biotech funds will regularly diligence and invest in longevity companies.

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And more information on Age1’s Substack:

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The company’s Substack where they write about what they are doing as a company:

Why does it matter?


We’re at a historic inflection point in biotech. In the next decade, the preservation of a healthy life will go from a futuristic ideal to an actionable right.

In the original draft of The Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that all humans “derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life , liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

This is our goal at age1: the preservation of healthy life, to enable a more dignified future globally for humans of all ages.

Some of the biggest human accomplishments progressed us towards this goal. Since the inception of antibiotics in the 1910s, they have extended the global life expectancy by 23 years. These now-taken-for-granted solutions combat the propensity of humans to develop infections constituting modern medicine, yet the thought of democratizing such therapeutics was once laughable. Similarly, we foresee a future with universal access to a healthy life enabled by longevity biotech.

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Wow, this is really exciting!! Excited to see what they end up doing.

New podcast:

Catalyzing moonshots in longevity biotech (Alex Colville, Age1)

https://open.spotify.com/episode/232eeWoYD5CwBmhkhZ4wKe

Another New Podcast with Alex Colville:

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