Company Profiles: Juvenescence

Juvenescence, a company focused on developing treatments for diseases of aging and increasing human longevity, secured $100 million in a Series B financing round to support the company’s programs that harness the power of artificial intelligence.

For British Virgin Islands-based Juvenescence, the $100 million tranche brings the company’s total fundraising efforts this over the past 18 months to $165 million. That total includes a $50 million Series A financing round the company closed in June 2018. The total said the fundraising support it has received to date “speaks to the extraordinary opportunity as well as interest in developing therapeutics with the capacity to modify aging.”

Greg Bailey, chief executive officer of Juvenescence, said the past six months has been an exciting time for the company. He pointed to the expansion of the company’s team of drug developers and artificial intelligence experts supporting the development of the company’s therapeutics who are expected to bring those products to market. The company is focused on developing therapies that target cellular aging, the slowing and reversal of neurodegeneration, destroying senescent cells and more.

“We have also augmented our team working on using machine learning for drug discovery and for drug development: culminating with closing on this $100 Million Series B financing which provides us with sufficient working capital to progress many of our programs to their initial inflection points,” Bailey said in a brief statement.

With the amount of money the company has raised, Juvenescence said it aims at developing 12 therapeutic candidates within the field of healthy aging. It will lean heavily on machine learning and artificial intelligence. Part of the company’s strategy is to “create, partner with or invest in new companies with longevity-related therapeutics, by in-licensing compounds from academia and industry, or forming joint ventures to develop therapeutics for longevity.” An example of the company’s strategy is the March investment of $6.5 million in BYOMass Inc., a Massachusetts-based company focused on central control of metabolism in the context of aging and age-related diseases. Then in May, Juvenescence launched the biotech company Souvien Therapeutics, which is focused on the development of treatments to address neurodegenerative diseases by targeting the epigenetic underpinnings of neurodegeneration.

The latest financing round was supported from four cornerstone investors, including Grok Ventures, the investment company of Mike Cannon-Brookes (Atlassian cofounder), and Michael Spencer’s private investment company, IPGL, the company said.

Jim Mellon, chairman of the Juvenescence board of directors, said Juvenescence has recruited a group of “sophisticated shareholders” to support the mission of “improving human healthy lifespan.”

“Juvenescence has now raised more money than any comparable company, which is testament to the depth of our team and the range of opportunities that we have assembled, in partnership with scientist/entrepreneurs and research institutions. As the science of longevity becomes mainstream, we expect significant investor interest and at some point, we anticipate taking Juvenescence public to further accelerate our development,” Mellon said in a statement.