Q&A with Jorge Conde as An­dreessen Horowitz launch­es $750M bio fund III

When the tech VCs at An­dreessen Horowitz en­tered biotech 4.5 years ago with the $200 mil­lion bio fund I, the idea was sim­ple and hubris­tic: “We’re not go­ing to do biotech,” Vi­jay Pande said at the time, keep­ing a16z’s long­time stance. In­stead, “the bio fund is re­al­ly about fund­ing soft­ware com­pa­nies in the bio space.”

In the near-half decade since, they haven’t soft­ened their rhetoric. Pande and gen­er­al part­ner Jorge Conde’s fre­quent blog posts of­ten have the tone of”Burn­ing Man” tech­no­fu­tur­ists. Talk­ing of a “foun­da­tion­al shift in bi­ol­o­gy,” “bio-rev­o­lu­tion,” and “the mean­ing of life,” and drop­ping koans like “what is med­i­cine?” has turned them in­to the well-fi­nanced New Age mys­tics of an AI-dri­ven and bio­engi­neered fu­ture.

Julie Yoo

To­day, An­dreessen Horowitz is launch­ing bio fund III and putting $750 mil­lion be­hind it – more than funds I and II com­bined. They’ve added new part­ners, as they did be­fore fund I and II, pick­ing up tech­nol­o­gist and en­tre­pre­neur Julie Yoo and Vi­nee­ta Agar­wala, a GV and Broad In­sti­tute al­umn. It’ll take much of the same tack as the ear­li­er funds, in­vest­ing ear­ly and oc­ca­sion­al­ly up to Se­ries B, and pour­ing funds not on­ly in­to ther­a­peu­tics, but al­so di­ag­nos­tics, syn­thet­ic bi­ol­o­gy and star­tups bring­ing bi­o­log­i­cal ad­vances in­to oth­er sec­tors, such as agri­cul­ture.

But Conde tells End­points News that the group has learned a thing or two since fund I. Pande had talked about ex­tend­ing Moore’s law to bi­ol­o­gy through “dig­i­tal ther­a­peu­tics” but they were wrong. It wasn’t just about soft­ware and ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence. It was about the long list of ways how bi­ol­o­gy was done, how drugs were dis­cov­ered and how the whole health­care sys­tem func­tions. It was biotechs that worked both with ma­chine learn­ing and wet labs, and founders con­ver­sant in both.

Vi­nee­ta Agar­wala

Since then, they’ve in­vest­ed in com­pa­nies like In­sitro that in­te­grate AI as a core but not sole part of a drug de­vel­op­ment chain and Asi­mov, which is try­ing to use AI and oth­er tech sys­tems to de­sign a genome from scratch. They even in­vest­ed in EQRx, Alexan­der Borisey’s start­up try­ing to use me-too drugs to change pric­ing.

In Oc­to­ber, Conde, Pande and Yoo pub­lished their most soar­ing blog post yet: “Bi­ol­o­gy is Eat­ing the World: A Man­i­festo.” They wrote: “We are at the be­gin­ning of a new era, where bi­ol­o­gy has shift­ed from an em­pir­i­cal sci­ence to an en­gi­neer­ing dis­ci­pline.”

Be­fore the fund’s launch, though, Conde told End­points we’re “at the end of the be­gin­ning” for that era.

He talked about what they’ve learned since bio I, where bi­ol­o­gy and biotech is head­ed and how we’ll know when the con­ver­gence be­tween en­gi­neer­ing and bi­ol­o­gy he’s been proph­e­siz­ing has ar­rived.

You called this the “end of the be­gin­ning” for a new era. What does that mean?

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