Over the past 7 years I've been a founder in the emerging space of technology companies that focus on applying tech startup playbooks and approaches to company building to biology. My company, Notable, is in the precision medicine oncology field. There any many other startups advancing in a similar way in digital health, drug discovery, genomic and proteomic diagnostics, and clinical trial design, to name a few. Prior to starting Notable I was a portfolio manager at Peter Thiel's family office/hedge fund Clarium Capital.
Many of these companies build platform-based technologies, which can be partnered with other larger collaborators and/or used to build out an internal set of products or pipeline. These create exciting long term opportunities for angel investors, because they can reduce the binary aspect of traditional life science investing.
I have built up many relationships over the years in this space, so it made sense to begin investing as an angel and leading syndicates. As a CEO I benefitted from AngelList syndicates in several of our financing rounds, so I've been on the other side of the table from syndicate leads. This allows me to tailor my approach to be as founder-friendly as possible. I also believe in syndicates as a tool to bring in value-added angels to companies, so please feel free to reach out to me anytime to see if there are ways you think you can help a portfolio company!
Here are some of my recent investments:
Endpoint Health is a fully integrated healthcare company (Rx + Dx) that is personalizing care and developing targeted therapies for the world's largest unmet medical need - critical Illness. Critical illnesses like sepsis and ARDS are responsible for 1 in 5 global deaths and are the main cause of mortality in COVID-19, yet there are no approved therapies or personalized treatment approaches for these patients. Endpoint Health is solving this problem by using advances in big data and AI as well as deep partnerships with leading clinical research institutes to create and validate personalized solutions including tests that predict therapeutic response and novel targeted therapies developed in partnership with pharma. The company is led by a team of successful healthcare entrepreneurs that co-founded GeneWEAVE, one of the top Dx venture deals of 2015, and it will launch the world's first pivotal trial for precision guided therapy in critical illness next year. Endpoint's approach is set up to enable it to become the category leader that can achieve $5B+ annual revenues within the next 7-10 years while helping millions of people who get critical illness leave hospitals alive.
The natural world creates $1T of economic value every year and gave us paradigm-shifting medicines like aspirin, statin, cannabidiol, and psilocybin. Yet, 95% of nature’s chemical space remains unmapped for its enormous potential - until now. At Enveda Biosciences we’re combining breakthroughs in metabolomics, machine learning, and automation to build the first drug discovery search engine for dark chemical space. Led by Viswa Colluru (first PM at Recursion), Joe Rokicki (founder of Plexium), Sotirios Karathanasis (former CSO at Lilly and Head of Biosciences at AstraZeneca), and Pieter Dorrestein (Metabolomics pioneer at UCSD), we are not only changing where we look for new medicines but also the speed and scale at which we find them. With $5M in seed capital, we’ve built a world-class team and a pioneering drug discovery platform that has already produced a robust pipeline of assets. We are scaling our validated ML-driven platform built on the largest medicinal plant dataset and to advance the first 3 of our 8 preclinical programs to Phase I.
Oath is onboarding for motherhood. Oath’s digital platform curates intimate groups of expecting and new mothers, guided by an experienced facilitator and integrated with medical providers. By delivering care in a small, facilitated group setting, Oath is giving mothers a comprehensive solution to what they’ve been stitching together all along, beginning in pregnancy and continuing throughout pediatrics.
JunoDx is developing next generation cell-free DNA-based noninvasive prenatal test (NIPT) solutions. Their innovation simplifies sample collection and improves access to high quality test results without high cost, long lead times, and phlebotomy requirements of traditional NIPT.
Factorial Diagnostics is leveraging their proprietary in Situ Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) library prep methods and bioinformatics algorithms to commercialize single-cell, multi-mic cancer diagnostic assays. Factorial’s long-term ambition is to become the next big cancer diagnostic lab (e.g. Foundation Medicine, Guardant Health, Natera) by offering a first-in-class test that characterizes clonal and cellular heterogeneity at single-cell resolution. The technology that Factorial has developed offers faster and cheaper single-cell genomics than what is currently on the market.
Thanks so much for taking a look at my syndicates, please feel free to reach out anytime with any questions.
Best,
Matt De Silva
msd88@cornell.edu
I source my syndicate opportunities from founders I already know or via referrals from them. We are also a Y Combinator and First Round Capital portfolio company so I have access to a large number of early stage companies through those networks. I syndicate all deals where I can get a large enough allocation (+$75k).
