Coinbase CEO’s Biotech Firm Gets $130M to Fight Aging With AI, Genomics

By: bitcoin ethereum news|2025/05/07 19:45:01

In brief NewLimit aims to increase healthy lifespan using AI-driven cell reprogramming. The Series B round brings total funding to over $170 million, backed by top tech and VC names. The longevity startup is part of a broader trend of billionaire-backed longevity ventures. NewLimit, a biotechnology startup co-founded by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, has raised $130 million in a Series B funding round to bolster its ambitions to slow or even reverse aspects of human aging. The round, led by Kleiner Perkins, drew participation from prominent returning investors including Founders Fund, Dimension Capital, angel investor Elad Gil, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, according to a statement . New investors included former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Apple’s former machine learning director Daniel Gross, and Khosla Ventures. The raise brings the startup’s total funding to over $170 million following a $40 million Series A in 2023. Flip it and reverse it Armstrong launched NewLimit more than four years ago with former GV partner Blake Byers and stem cell researcher Jacob Kimmel. The company is pursuing therapies that increase “healthy life expectancy”—how long someone can live a healthy life, as opposed to just life expectancy—by reprogramming the human epigenome by altering how cells behave without changing their underlying DNA. NewLimit described its mission as treating aging itself, which it called the “meta driver of nearly every major human disease.” “Once thought to be irreversible, the emerging science of epigenetic reprogramming has shown that aging is in fact malleable,” it said. NewLimit is part of a growing movement among tech billionaires who are pivoting from software and fintech to the tantalizing prospect of biological immortality. Billionaire obsession The venture fits squarely in a wave of Silicon Valley-backed longevity startups hoping to solve the age-old problem of aging itself with cutting-edge tech and a lot of money. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is one of the biggest funders of Retro Biosciences, which is pursuing age-reversal drugs. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has thrown his weight behind another venture, Altos Labs, aiming to “reverse disease, injury, and the disabilities that occur throughout life by restoring cell health and resilience through cell rejuvenation.” Meanwhile, Methuselah Foundation, a nonprofit named after the Bible’s longest-living figure (he supposedly died at the age of 969), has the ambitious goal of making “90 the new 50 by 2030.” It counts PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin among its donors. NewLimit’s strategy pairs large-scale genomics with AI-driven analysis. Its “Discovery Engine” tests thousands of reprogramming combinations on human cells and studies the effects. The company’s machine learning models help choose which cellular tweaks to pursue in the next cycle, avoiding random trial-and-error in favor of targeted experimentation. It has yet to conduct any human trials. “We’ve built technology to run the largest experiments in the field,” the company said in the statement. “Our bet is that this combination of AI and scaled genomics can unlock medicines that give each of us more healthy years.” Edited by Sebastian Sinclair Generally Intelligent Newsletter A weekly AI journey narrated by Gen, a generative AI model. Source: https://decrypt.co/318262/coinbase-ceos-biotech-firm-gets-130m-to-fight-aging-with-ai-genomics

AI has become critical infrastructure, and governments and corporations are competing to control it. Centralized development and regulation are entrenching existing power structures. The Web3 community is building a decentralized alternative — distributed compute, token incentives, and community governance — before that window closes.

Vitalik wrote a proposal teaching you how to secretly use AI large models

Vitalik believes that in the AI era, users should not have to give up their identity to use an AI tool.

On the eve of the explosion of on-chain options

Options are becoming a new anchor in the cryptocurrency market.

WEEX AI Hackathon: How Did This AI Trading Winner Succeed?

A self-taught AI trading enthusiast achieved top-10 results at the WEEX AI Hackathon. Learn about the mindset, AI tools, and lessons behind this impressive performance.

One Balance to Rule Them All: Gravitas' On-Chain Prime Broker Ambition

Forty years ago, a technological revolution broke the isolation of information, reshaping Wall Street. Forty years later, Grvt aims to break the isolation of capital with an on-chain prime brokerage model.

That person who cashed out at the NFT peak is now selling a new shovel in the OpenClaw craze

A skilled person never picks the table, they eat meat with every bite.

Inter-generational Prisoner's Dilemma Resolution: The Nomadic Capital and Bitcoin's Inevitable Path

When the Baby Boomer generation collectively sells off, who will be the "bag holder" in the next asset crash?

Upstream and downstream are starting to fight, all for the sake of everyone being able to "Lobster"

「Lobster」 may not be a mature product yet, but it has already ushered in a new era of 「AI Assistants」.

Circle and Mastercard Announce Partnership, the Next Stage for the Crypto Industry Belongs to Payments

Stablecoins are transitioning from a speculative tool to real financial scenarios such as payments, cross-border transfers, and store of value.

From 5 Mao per kWh of Chinese electricity to a $45 API export: Tokens are rewriting currency units

When the same unit can both measure hashing power and facilitate payments, it ceases to be just a term and begins to evolve into a new currency of both value and influence.