Coinbase CEO’s Biotech Firm Gets $130M to Fight Aging With AI, Genomics

NewLimit, a biotechnology startup co-founded by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, has raised $130 million in a Series B funding round to bolster its ambitions to slow or even reverse aspects of human aging.

The round, led by Kleiner Perkins, drew participation from prominent returning investors including Founders Fund, Dimension Capital, angel investor Elad Gil, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, according to a statement.

New investors included former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Apple’s former machine learning director Daniel Gross, and Khosla Ventures. The raise brings the startup’s total funding to over $170 million following a $40 million Series A in 2023.

Flip it and reverse it

Armstrong launched NewLimit more than four years ago with former GV partner Blake Byers and stem cell researcher Jacob Kimmel. 

The company is pursuing therapies that increase “healthy life expectancy”—how long someone can live a healthy life, as opposed to just life expectancy—by reprogramming the human epigenome by altering how cells behave without changing their underlying DNA.

NewLimit described its mission as treating aging itself, which it called the “meta driver of nearly every major human disease.” 

“Once thought to be irreversible, the emerging science of epigenetic reprogramming has shown that aging is in fact malleable,” it said. 

NewLimit is part of a growing movement among tech billionaires who are pivoting from software and fintech to the tantalizing prospect of biological immortality. 

Billionaire obsession

The venture fits squarely in a wave of Silicon Valley-backed longevity startups hoping to solve the age-old problem of aging itself with cutting-edge tech and a lot of money.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is one of the biggest funders of Retro Biosciences, which is pursuing age-reversal drugs. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has thrown his weight behind another venture, Altos Labs, aiming to “reverse disease, injury, and the disabilities that occur throughout life by restoring cell health and resilience through cell rejuvenation.”

Meanwhile, Methuselah Foundation, a nonprofit named after the Bible’s longest-living figure (he supposedly died at the age of 969), has the ambitious goal of making “90 the new 50 by 2030.” It counts PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin among its donors.

NewLimit’s strategy pairs large-scale genomics with AI-driven analysis. 

Its “Discovery Engine” tests thousands of reprogramming combinations on human cells and studies the effects. 

The company’s machine learning models help choose which cellular tweaks to pursue in the next cycle, avoiding random trial-and-error in favor of targeted experimentation. It has yet to conduct any human trials. 

“We’ve built technology to run the largest experiments in the field,” the company said in the statement. “Our bet is that this combination of AI and scaled genomics can unlock medicines that give each of us more healthy years.”

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair