Khosla joins bet on unconventional startup looking to send drug delivering robots into the brain
When Michael Shpigelmacher started the project, he knew he’d have to fund it himself. Every other effort of its kind was academic, rejected as too risky by investors.
Shpigelmacher, a robotics geek and entrepreneur who had drifted into consulting for pharma, wanted to build the real-life equivalent of technology from the 1960s film “Fantastic Voyage,” the one where a submarine crew is shrunk to “about the size of a microbe” and sent on a mission to repair a scientist’s brain. He scanned the literature, found the lab that was working on the most advanced project — at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, it turned out — and started funding them with money from his and his co-founders’ own accounts, along with some seed cash from friends and family.
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