After rejuvenating liver and immune cells, startup claims progress towards extending human healthspan has moved ‘faster than expected.’
Longevity biotech NewLimit has raised $130 million in Series B funding to advance its mission to extend human healthspan through epigenetic reprogramming. Founded with the goal of developing medicines that increase the number of healthy years in human life, NewLimit initially anticipated a long multi-year trajectory toward tangible scientific progress. However, the company claims it has made recent breakthroughs that have accelerated its development timeline, which led to its decision to raise new capital.
“We founded NewLimit to develop medicines that add healthy years to each human life,” said the company in a statement. “Initially, we thought it would take many years to show progress toward this goal. We’re proud that our team achieved this milestone faster than we expected.”
NewLimit’s scientific strategy centers on targeting aging as the root cause of many major diseases, rather than addressing individual pathologies in isolation. Epigenetic reprogramming, its core technology, involves manipulating the epigenome – the system that controls which genes are active or inactive in a given cell type. With age, this epigenetic control system deteriorates, leading to diminished cellular function and the onset of disease. By identifying transcription factor sets that can reset or rejuvenate these patterns, NewLimit seeks to restore youthful functionality to aged cells.
NewLimit has prioritized the immune system and liver as its first therapeutic areas. In preclinical studies, the company recently revealed it had restored ‘youthful function’ to liver and immune cells, discovering three transcription factor sets that demonstrate efficacy in animal models of liver disease and another three that rejuvenate aged T cells.
The approach leverages recent advances in single-cell genomics, epigenetic editing and artificial intelligence. By conducting large-scale experiments and using the data to train AI models, NewLimit is able to focus on the most promising therapeutic candidates with capital efficiency. The goal is to systematically develop interventions that not only target the symptoms of aging but also its biological roots, ultimately creating a new class of medicines with the potential to prevent or reverse a wide range of age-related diseases.
The new funding builds on NewLimit’s $40 million Series A and an initial founding investment of $110 million, making the company one of the most well-capitalized players in the longevity biotech field. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins and included new investors Khosla Ventures, Human Capital, Valor Equity Partners and Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. Previous backers including Dimension and Founders Fund also participated, alongside a host of angel investors as well as NewLimit co-founder Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong.
NewLimit describes its mission to address aging biology as “one of the most consequential projects of humanity” and hopes its progress will “help inspire broader interest and investment in aging therapeutics.”
