Two former investors for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust and the Gates family investment office have launched a $135 million investment fund focused on startups using “deep technology” to tackle some of humanity’s most difficult challenges.
The Seattle-based fund is called Bison Ventures. Its founders, Tom Biegala and Ben Hemani, both worked for the Gates’ Cascade Asset Management Company.
All four of Bison Ventures’ investors, which also includes principals Ari Wright and Caleb Appleton, have engineering backgrounds — three in climate tech and one in biomedicine.
“With diversified engineering backgrounds, we are not afraid to deal in the physical and biological world,” Hemani said in a statement. “We know that the best solutions derive from technology integration from different industries and applications, and we are comfortable backing bold companies early on in their lifecycle when technical risk still exists.”
Deep tech is used to describe a subset of startups that rely on breakthrough science and engineering to solve problems.
The fund’s focal areas include applying AI and other cutting-edge engineering to biology; food and agriculture; hardware; and transportation and digital connectivity.
Bison Ventures has announced investments in six startups:
- Allonnia: harnessing naturally occurring enzymes, proteins and microbes to address pollutants and waste.
- Frontera Health: using artificial intelligence to improve behavioral health.
- InnerPlant: deploying technology that can visually detect signals from plants that are stressed by drought, pathogens or fertilizers.
- Juvena Therapeutics: using AI to identify the therapeutic potential of proteins released by stem cells.
- Zyphra: engineering what aims to be dramatically more efficient AI training.
- Unnamed stealth company: developing generative AI.
“Most venture dollars today continue to chase pure software companies,” Hemani said. “However, it was frontier technologies such as NVIDIA’s GPUs and Ginkgo Bioworks’ microbe engineering platform that enabled today’s revolutions in AI and synthetic biology respectively.”
The fund is backing companies with diverse leadership: 80% of the CEOs belong to groups that are “traditionally under-represented in venture-backed companies,” according to Bison Ventures, including three CEOs who are women.
Bison Ventures is investing in early stage companies that fall between the earliest-stage ventures tapping government and academic support and those with revenue-generating commercial products.
Hemani and Biegala’s former employer, Bill Gates, is himself leading an investment and research venture called Breakthrough Energy that focuses on climate tech, including software and hardware solutions.
