Bio founders may not think of Boost VC when they sit down to raise their first round. That is a mistake, and that’s my fault… and I want to fix it.
We believe that just like in the early 2000s, the cloud and other technical advancements reduced the cost of becoming a digital founder… I believe that the cost to start a bio company has plummeted — you could be a 16 year old, sitting in a high school classroom and cure cancer today!!
Bio is Deep Tech, and is going to be the single largest movement in the next decade.
Over the last two years, Boost VC has invested in more than 50 bio companies. Bio is now our single most active space. We are writing pre-seed checks into synthetic biology, diagnostics, biosecurity, longevity, and a dozen flavors of science that still sound made up. If you are building any of it, we should be talking. We call it New Bio.
So why now? Two big things changed.
The patient became the hero
People no longer wait for permission to take charge of their own health. They test at home, they read their own data, and more and more of them solve their own problems before the system gets around to it. The founder of GitLab went “Founder Mode” on his own cancer. An Australian shrank his dog’s tumor. These are not freak stories anymore. They are the leading edge of a culture where everyone expects to be the hero of their own healthcare journey, and people finally have the confidence and the tools to act on it. That shift creates real demand, and demand is what turns frontier science into real companies.
The tools got really good
At the same time, the cost of doing biology fell off a cliff and the power of the tools went vertical. The cost of sequencing your DNA has gone from $3 Billion, to $500.
AI and bio foundation models can now decode biological complexity that used to take years. The cost of biomolecular analysis, with nucleic acid sequencing as the obvious example, keeps dropping. And laboratory robotics is turning the wet lab into something that looks a lot more like a software stack you can run, version, and scale.
Here is the part most people miss. These unlocks do more than help us treat disease. They let us engineer living things to do things they never evolved to do. That is the doorway to a whole generation of sci-fi synthetic biology startups.
You do not need a PhD to build the future of biology!
This is the line I most want founders to hear. Yes, brilliant scientists start great bio companies. But scientists are not the only people who can build them. Engineers can build them. Self-taught obsessives can build them. The founder who cures cancer does not need a doctorate. They need conviction, velocity, and the stubbornness to keep going after everyone tells them it is impossible.
We have backed plenty of PhDs. We have also backed teenagers running real experiments in garage labs. We bet on the builder, not the credential.
What we are especially excited about
Chemical treatments to bio-cures. Move patient care from chemical treatments to biological cures. Stop managing disease with chemistry and start fixing it with biology.
Superpowers and longevity. Live longer, live healthier, and give humans abilities we were never born with. All diseases can and should be cured, and the human experience can be enhanced.
Bio-security. See threats coming at the speed of biology and stop them before they spread. This is one of the most important and most underfunded frontiers on the planet.
If this is who you are, Boost VC wants to be your first believer and your first check. We move fast, like to lead pre-seed rounds, and are not scared of the ideas the rest of the market still calls crazy. Come build the future of biology with us.
Some examples of companies we have invested in
Colossal: The de-extinction company (bringing back the woolly mammoth)
New Limit: Radically expanding human healthspan
Impli: Transforming implantable intelligence
Taxa: Skin probiotics active for a full week after a single application
Dognosis: Unleashing canine super-powers for human health
Vertility Health: Solve genetic disease forever
Prospera: Special Economic Zone, enabling bio innovation over regulation
Boost has been awesome! Got to talk to Sid and his team recently. So glad I get to be part of the movement of helping patients become the hero.
They do but what if the next brain implant isn’t Symbiotic or Neuralink but it’s “NION.“