NEWS
Recent press, public appearances, and other 50Y news
TechCrunch published an article “Space manufacturing startup Varda, incubated at Founders Fund, emerges with $9 million in funding”, covering one of our newest partnerships and quoting Seth. The piece was written by Jonathan Shieber.
We’re excited to announce our partnership with Varda - a company creating a scalable and economically viable system to manufacture products in space that are extremely important on Earth.
“We’re finally able to show some data that at least one fund backing really high risk, really high reward startups that, if successful, will be massively profitable and make a massive positive impact, is working.” - Dennis Price wrote about Fifty Years in his article for ImpactAlpha.
Green Queen, Hong Kong’s largest eco media platform advocating for social and environmental change, listed Ela as one of six female VCs whose actions change the world for the better.
Listen to our team discuss Evolving AAVs with Pierce Ogden (Manifold Bio) in episode 3 and designing a better COVID-19 vaccine with Nikolai Eroshenko (HelixNano) in episode 4.
During this seminar, we discussed some of the most important measurements and tests applied by deep tech start-ups (sensitivity vs specificity, false positive vs negative rate, prospective vs retrospective studies, multiple hypothesis corrections, regression, etc). The seminar was taught by Noel Jee, a Principal at Illumina Ventures.
Seth was invited to join a digital event hosted by SynBioBeta. Together with three other speakers, he discussed the opportunities in consumer biotechnology from the investor’s perspective.
Seth participated in this year’s online edition of Hello Tomorrow. Aside from being one of the jurors in the Industrial Biotech Startup Challenge, he joined a “Financing moonshots” panel discussion around the challenges of supporting long-term, risky, and market-changing deep tech startups.
Connie Loizos interviewed Seth for her article “VC Seth Bannon on how a Biden administration could best support climate startups”. Looking at the climate challenges through the prism of the upcoming election, Seth shared some of his ideas for solving the global crisis.
The first two episodes of our Translation podcast are out! Listen to Surojit Biswass (the co-founder and CEO of Nabla Bio) discuss protein engineering in episode 1, and Tina Boville (the co-founder and CEO of Aralez Bio) talk about evolving enzymes in episode 2.
Carbon sequestration is an essential component of the climate solutions toolkit, and critical for achieving ambitious climate goals. But what pathways to carbon sequestration are most promising? How do these pathways complement other emissions reductions approaches? This seminar, led by the the Executive Director and co-founder of Carbon 180 — Noah Deich, explored these key questions, diving deeply into how investors, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists can have the largest impact in the field today.
Watch the seminar here:
Fifty Years partners with Ansa Bio to enable faster, cleaner, more accurate DNA synthesis.
Jonathan Shieber wrote about one of our portfolio companies, Ansa Biotechnologies, and quoted Seth in an article for TechCrunch.
Ela was invited to join IndieBio’s Investor Panel focusing on the Future of Human and Planetary Health. The panelists discussed the trends they are seeing in biotech and in companies tackling climate change, and shared their suggestions on building a company in the rapidly changing world.
What are clean chemicals? What has shaped and defined the chemical industry at large? Can the chemical industry, where the main players have not changed since World War 2, be actually disrupted? We answered these questions during the seminar taught by Wojciech Osowiecki, who holds a PhD in chemistry from UC Berkeley, and currently is a process engineer at Lam Research.
Watch the seminar here:
Seth was invited to moderate a seminar hosted by BCLA for some 500 participants. Together with Alice Cheng of Upfront Ventures, Chris Bostick of OCV Ventures, Michelle Kim-Danely of Auto-Bahn Labs, and Josh Palmer and Pascal Krotee of Kairos Ventures, he discussed the process of transitioning from PhD to VC.
At Fifty Years, our sweet spot is supporting founders at the earliest stages building deep tech companies that can generate huge financial outcomes and create massive positive impact. Manifold Bio is a perfect example of just that and we’re proud to announce our partnership.
Why are there still 4 billion unconnected in the world? What economic and technological realities drive this? Who’s responsible and who's trying to fix it? What are the solutions and where are the opportunities? Why are there still 4 billion unconnected in the world? What are the solutions and where are the opportunities? These — and more — questions were andwered during our seminar led by Siamak Ebadi, the founder of UTVATE.
Understanding the intricacies of intellectual property (IP) is vital to innovators and investors. Deep tech companies win by out-innovating the competition and by building the best products, but they often rely on protective and preventive IP strategies. Despite this, there's a fundamental knowledge gap between founders and legal strategists -- we want to help fix that and have organized a seminar on Intellectual Property for Deep Tech led by Michelle Holoubek, Don Featherstone and Gaby Longsworth.
Watch the seminar here:
Together with Impact.Tech, Fifty Years hosted yet another seminar focused on Bioengineering. The event introduced non-professional biologists to the types of information encoded by genomes and affected by numerous chemical processes and interactions and was led by Louis Metzger, a Ph.D. in Biochemistry at Duke University.
Watch the seminar here:
