Longevity investment venture capital announces acceleration programme

Call for future founders: longevity investment fund LongeVC announces in-house acceleration programme.

LongeVC – a longevity investment group backed by an advisory board with solid longevity credentials – is launching its in-house acceleration programme. The company is looking for professionals with education and work experience in the biotech industry with the aim of to creating high-quality start-up teams that could focus on solving particular industry challenges.

Longevity.Technology: Latvian investment group LongeVC is one we’re keeping a close eye on, since it announced its first official early-stage fund after its Deep Longevity exit. Its $35 million early-stage investment fund for ventures is focused on biotech and longevity opportunities. In November last year, co-founder Sergey Jakimov told us that the time is right for specialist longevity investment, and this announcement adds weight to that argument.

“I am prepared to say that our approach is fairly unique if we compare it to the normal venture capital industry practice. The venture capital fund LongeVC has created its own accelerator. This means that from time to time LongeVC will define verticals that we see the biggest potential in. We will address professionals that have applied to the program. We will help to form the team and add additional competencies,” explains LongeVC venture capital fund partner Sergey Jakimov.

Longevity.Technology reached out to co-founder Sergey Jakimov for his take on the new programme. He explained there are two parts of acceleration – one is fairly standard (e.g. call for companies, which are simply earlier on in their journey) and a second, fairly unique piece, which is a call for founders. This is where LongeVC will try to pilot the approach of identifying promising niches and facilitating team formations with their existing industrial partners, including backing their spin-offs with dedicated teams. This has, Jakimov feels, the potential to be very promising indeed.

“We are currently looking at several areas of our utmost interest, pet longevity among one of the most interesting and growth-oriented ones,” Jakimov told us. “This is a very vibrant and yet, still underrepresented market, which lacks solutions for a comprehensive and actionable approach to prolonging the healthy lives of pets.”

Applications will be selected on a rolling basis, and applicants are invited to fill in a form on the LongeVC website to demonstrate their expertise in the field. However, for LongeVC, the amount of previous experience doesn’t matter, as they plan to create diverse teams by combining different levels of knowledge and the expertise of team members.

“… the next longevity unicorn can be built from the ground up …”

“Our team believes that the next longevity unicorn can be built from the ground up. LongeVC regularly identifies a promising technological area, which, in our mind, will grow significantly in coming years. We also believe that outstanding individuals can be united into teams to work on building groundbreaking products and technologies in these areas.

We, therefore, encourage individual founders with a biotech background to apply, sharing their ideas around a proposed tech area,” says Jakimov.

Also, venture capital fund LongeVC will continue to look for start-ups in the longevity industry at the seed-early A stage. The fund is willing to invest in teams already formed and MVP concepts that need an initial injection of capital and industrial expertise from the insider. Applications are open.

Longevity investment and accelerating promising projects

“There are plenty of promising projects on the market and most of them are not receiving the necessary level of support that would allow them to develop. It is therefore extremely important to identify and onboard such projects early on. And that is what accelerator programs are for. One of the key areas for us is AI for drug discovery and AI for predictive diagnostics, where it is very important to give teams access to industrial expertise and high-quality data subsets from the start, ensuring quality product development and thus preventing market lag,” says LongeVC Venture Partner, private investor and philanthropist, Rustam Gilfanov.

The total amount of the money available from the venture capital fund LongeVC is €35 million; the fund is targeting seed-stage and pre-A funding round companies because there are limited opportunities worldwide to secure investments during these stages. LongeVC has a strong focus on companies working with solutions in longevity and biotechnology.

LongeVC says that experts in the longevity field have already joined a team as advisors and are available to start-ups. The company is already collaborating with the anti-aging pioneer and renowned gerontologists, Aubrey De Grey, PhD, and founder of Deep Longevity and Adjunct Professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, as well as many others.