Funding, Technology, Venture Capital, Health, Medicine, Stablecoin

Longevity, the science of extending a healthy lifespan, has quickly moved from a fringe concept to a serious focus for mainstream capital, attracting investments from tech titans like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. This journey from ambitious idea to disruptive force mirrors that of the crypto world, creating a unique ideological alignment between two of the most forward-thinking industries.

At the intersection of these two frontiers is LongeVC, a venture fund focused on longevity biotech. Its first fund validated its approach of focusing on scientific signal over consumer noise, backing 20 companies, including two unicorns, with portfolio companies now holding strategic deals with major pharmaceutical firms exceeding $2.5 billion.

Now, the firm is launching its second, $120 million fund, which introduces a feature new to the biotech industry: the ability to accept capital commitments in stablecoins.

In this interview, LongeVC’s managing partner Sergey Jakimov discusses the strategy behind the new fund and the company’s novel approach to bridging the worlds of crypto and biotech.

Cointelegraph: You are preparing to raise your second fund. What is your main goal this time?

Sergey Jakimov: We stay loyal to our ideological framework of what longevity is — the second fund will back early-to-mid stage therapeutics and early diagnostics in age-related diseases and pivotal AI for drug discovery platforms. We call those longevity infrastructure.

The first fund was $25 million, 30% of which was provided by general partners. The second fund will fully close at $120 million. It will retain the stage and tech focus of Fund 1, being able to deploy more capital into a single portfolio company, maximizing the returns and accelerating the product development.

Being structured as a 10-year vehicle (5-year investing + 5-year portfolio management), it prioritizes several things:

  • Continued limited partner (LP) integration into our ecosystem — allocations for co-investment, access to longevity clinics and key opinion leaders (KOLs);

  • First exits by year 3-4 with a total targeted average return of 4-5x cash on cash;

  • Being the first hard-biotech investment vehicle to allow crypto-holders to fill capital commitments in stablecoins.

CT: Which lessons from your first fund directly inform how you source, do your diligence and structure deals this time around?

SJ: There are several:

  1. We have validated our major hypothesis – longevity biotech investing risk can be dramatically reduced by prioritizing pragmatic focus and scientific due diligence, looking beyond the consumer noise.

  2. Our deal sourcing network via direct relationships with institutions and scientific KOLs worked really well — Fund 1 has invested in some of the most desired early and mid-stage allocations in the field, and Fund 2 will double down on maintaining this ability.

  3. We are most efficient in sourcing future longevity winners early and mid-stage. Fund 1, however, lacked capital for significant follow-up funding. Major lesson — most successful Fund 1 portfolio companies could have taken 4-5x more capital from us if we had an opportunity to deploy. With Fund 2, we are removing this hurdle.

  4. We will lead more, especially early stages.

  5. Our Fund 1 LPs have fully utilized their access to co-investments and longevity infrastructure. Fund 2 will be putting even more emphasis on LP integration into the longevity ecosystem, from private clinics and longevity physicians to closed allocations.

  6. We’ve seen significant interest from crypto-focused investors to join, but did not have the ability to onboard those, as Fund1 was a European vehicle. This time around, we are fully capable of accepting capital calls in stablecoins, unlocking a separate pool of potential LPs.

CT: How do you plan to bridge the historically conservative biotech world with the crypto ecosystem?

SJ: First, we think that there is a lot in common between the two. Longevity biotech started as a separate field 10-15 years ago, being perceived as extremely ambitious and often not serious. It was, however, meticulously pushed forward by visionary founders and investors, evolving into the fastest-growing segment of biotech with all major pharma currently chipping in.

Sergey Jakimov speaking at the Longevity Science Summit in Miami. Source: LongeVC

Crypto, in our mind, has done the same for finance — progressed from being frowned upon to being on the way to dominating the segment. As a result, it is a similar setup — a progressive and groundbreaking movement in a segment that has historically been conservative.

With the second fund, we’ve made sure that our Delaware structure can accept commitments in US dollars, which can later be filled with stablecoin capital calls. The fund operates official wallets in US-based licensed and regulated cryptocurrency exchanges, ensuring capital calls are immediately converted to fiat and used to fill the fund’s allocations.

We have, therefore, combined traditional fiat-focused LPs with crypto-holding investors under one roof, providing equal infrastructure and coinvestment access opportunities.

CT: Why introduce stablecoin commitments now, and how are you handling compliance, custody and conversion mechanics around them?

SJ:

  1. Stabecoin holders are a significant LP pool for us. They are like-minded — understand the need to be in the frontline of the rapidly emerging field and interested in rejuvenation biotech, combating age-related diseases, and, frankly, living longer, healthier. It is, thus, a combo of ideological and strategic alignment.

  2. The US regulatory framework — largely thanks to the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the US Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — creates favorable compliance conditions for venture capital investment vehicles to accept digital assets in satisfaction of individual limited partner commitments. We have integrated investor-friendly conversion mechanics by adding a feasible mark-up to each LP’s pro-rata commitment share once capital is called, in order to hedge against value fluctuation risk between the stablecoin transfer and conversion to fiat. Any unused portion of the mark-up fee will be returned to the LPs once the conversion takes place.

CT: How do global ageing demographics and a multibillion‑dollar longevity market guide your deployment strategy?

SJ:  They make it even more focused and pragmatic. There are a few things to consider here:

  1. So far, aging is very hard to tackle systemically, as a disease. We are, therefore, bound to look at different, more focused “manifestations” of aging and tackle those radically. This is where the disease focus comes in.

  2. We mostly deploy in tech that combines aging biology with disease focus, allowing us to address large (proportional to the overall population size) disease cohorts — oncology, neurodegeneration, cardiovascular diseases.

  3. Apart from this, there are two important investment categories to consider: prevention and longevity infrastructure. Prevention fundamentally starts with ultra-early diagnostics or prediction models that allow for taking precautionary measures against disease progression, prolonging healthspan. Infrastructure contains both advancements in artificial intelligence for faster longevity-focused drug design, as well as longevity medicine as a separate framework of care that integrates into the daily life of a patient (think preventive healthcare in longevity medicine vs. reactive sick care in a traditional healthcare/hospital system setting).

CT: How does the involvement of tech titans like Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos in longevity shift perceptions for this field?

SJ: It certainly popularizes the field to a non-biotech investor crowd. It shows several things:

  • Large capital holders care about longevity/life extension biotech and are willing to deploy significant amounts of personal capital into it. One can speculate whether it is in personal or societal interests, but the trend is clearly there.

  • It is evident they recognize biotech being reshaped into a preventive and regenerative thesis, stepping aside from a traditional disease maintenance perspective.

  • The field certainly becomes more mainstream — both Bezos, Altman and others are not perceived as biotech savvy investors, having made their fortunes in other industries. Their involvement is making the field both publicly accessible and more vocal.

  • The approaches they invest in elevate other, lesser-known companies in the space. E.g., with Bezos investing in Altos and epigenetic reprogramming, the approach became more known and companies with less exposure but, very often, more advanced science were able to fundraise.

CT: How do you align the crypto community’s 24/7 liquidity expectations with the long scientific and regulatory timelines of longevity biotech?

SJ: We think that there are different mentalities within the crypto community itself. We also believe that the “fast liquidity only” mentality is drying out, allowing for a more strategic capital allocation strategy among large crypto holders. In other words, even if a hypothetical crypto family office does fast trades, it does not and should not invalidate their interest toward more strategically value-added fields like longevity biotech.

Also, while it is entirely wrong to perceive biotech investments as a 10-year play, it is also unrealistic to expect gains in a few months. A successful, well-timed exit horizon in our industry is 2-4 years with a target multiple of over 6-7x. We do, therefore, expect that crypto asset holders understand these basics and do not transfer 24/7 liquidity expectations to biotech investing.

CT: Looking a decade ahead, what does a world where crypto capital seamlessly powers longevity breakthroughs actually look like — for patients, founders and the way science itself is financed?

SJ: Like it or not, if one becomes a cancer or neurodegenerative patient today, the treatment offered will most likely be once funded by venture capital and only then acquired by big pharma. The vast majority of cancer, neuro, cardiovascular and other drugs, as well as screening methods, exist due to being funded by venture capitalists early. The more capital is available, the more chances there are for such tech to reach the market.

A decade ahead, we certainly want crypto capital equally participating in funding approaches to radically cure or prevent age-related diseases, expanding the pool of available capital and, thus, speeding up patient outcomes. We really believe that crypto, with a certain degree of strategic thinking and allocation involved, can be an extremely nimble and efficient capital source that is often of scarcity in biotech.

Learn more about LongeVC

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