NOVOS is dreaming big to improve health, quality of life and lifespan all at the same time.
Last week we covered NOVOS’ $3.15 million pre-seed funding round which was led by Resolute Ventures with support from Arkitekt Ventures, Longevitytech.fund, Awesome People Ventures and 20 institutional investors and entrepreneurs, as well as oversubscribed by 300%.
Longevity.Technology: New York-based NOVOS is a longevity platform committed to developing solutions for healthy aging and longevity. It offers science-based nutraceuticals, at-home tests and education to help people to improve their healthspans and lifespans. NOVOS is not a company to do things by halves; it took NOVOS Core from stealth to market in 4 weeks, and this latest raise was heavily oversubscribed to the tune of 300%. The future seems rosy for NOVOS, but what is the perspective of those on the inside? We caught up with co-founders Chris Mirabile and Dr Kris Verburgh to find out more.
NOVOS’ goal is to become the trusted, go-to source for scientifically superior nutraceuticals, tests and education to slow down aging. “We want to help people to improve their health span and lifespan,” explains Chris Mirabile. “We developed NOVOS Core, the first supplement focused on targeting 9 hallmarks of aging – scientifically proven causes of aging. We launched in January and sold out of both NOVOS Core and Boost in less than a week. We hadn’t anticipated such an influx of orders, so it was difficult for us to keep up with demand. We have since made major progress on our supply chains and are manufacturing much larger batches to avoid selling out again.”
As a Public Benefit Corporation, NOVOS also offer a knowledge channel to educate people on ways to impact their aging, offer free tests, and will soon offer biological tests that users can run from their homes.
With developments in the offing, NOVOS’ co-founders were delighted with how well the recent round went.
“The round went very well, with three times more interest than we could allocate to this pre-seed round,” Mirabile explains. “More than two dozen institutional investors and noteworthy entrepreneurs invested. It was led by Mike Hirshland, Partner of Resolute Ventures, who has invested in dozens of successful companies, including Automattic (WordPress) and Bark, which IPOed this year. He also founded Dogpatch Labs, from which Instagram was launched.
“Other investors include Arkitekt Ventures (a venture fund focused on companies that transform science and technology into solutions that radically improve and advance human health), the Longevitytech.fund (investing in technologies that address aging) and Uncommon Denominator (a venture capital fund focused on frontier technologies and innovative consumer brands). We are very thankful for our investors, who share our vision of improving humanity’s health today and in the decades to come, by directly addressing the biological causes of aging and aging-related diseases.”
NOVOS plans to use round of funding to support the company’s rapid growth, power clinical research and propel the development of a leading longevity-focused platform, working toward achieving NOVOS’ vision of being a leading science-backed longevity brand.
“Our biggest focus will be on scaling the team, operations and public awareness,” explains Mirabile. “We will also be providing additional free resources to the public as part of our mission as a Public Benefit Corporation and investing in longevity research that will have a materially positive impact on human health span and lifespan.”
Part of this vision includes the aforementioned biological tests that can be conducted from home.
Personalised medicine is very much on the up, with individual biomarkers and epigenetics being used to drill down to a very personalised set of results and proposed therapies. With myriad aging clocks available, what is NOVOS’ path through the testing terrain?
“We strongly believe in empowering people to take their health and aging process into their own hands,” says Kris Verburgh, MD and Chief Scientific Officer. “One way is by offering aging clocks, to see how old you are biologically and your rate of aging. We’ve been looking into many epigenetic clocks, as well as ribosomal, hematological, glycation and transcriptomic clocks. All of them differ and have their pros and cons. The field of aging clocks is moving quickly, with new algorithms being developed and updated continuously.
“One problem is that many clocks are not yet accurate enough, and another is that most have been developed to be used at a group level, not individual. However, many clocks are becoming more accurate, and we hope to soon be able to offer what we believe are the best and most interesting clocks and aging tests. In the meantime, we already offer two free aging tests on our website, namely the NOVOS FaceAge test, in which you can upload a picture of your face and have it analyzed by AI to determine your biological facial age. This algorithm has been trained on 12 million images. We also provide an extensive health questionnaire to help people to assess and think about their health.”
This broad vision – taking in the longevity vista from supplements, to personalised antiaging therapies to education – is part of what makes NOVOS such an exciting company in the space.
“We have some big dreams,” says Verburgh. “First, to enable people to live as long and as healthy lives as possible. We believe the most effective way to do this is through science-based supplements, health tests and by spreading knowledge.
“Another dream is to contribute to a world where we can achieve much better health by acting on the root cause of so many diseases and suffering: aging.”
Aging is the root cause of aging-related diseases like heart disease, Alzheimer’s and cancer, and is the biggest cause of disability, infirmity, and frailty.
“Despite all this, most governments ignore aging, most MDs are not trained in aging, and pharma is not focusing on aging,” Verburgh explains. “This is very unfortunate and we want to change this, by increasing awareness about aging – what causes it and how we can slow it down – so we can improve our health, quality of life, and lifespan all at the same time.”
