For­mer Google CEO’s VC is mak­ing a big­ger push in­to the biotech world, hir­ing promi­nent Ther­a­nos skep­tic

17 Aug 2022
endpts.com
Ven­ture cap­i­tal firm In­no­va­tion En­deav­ors has main­ly had its fo­cus on in­vest­ments across the tech space, but it has been slow­ly turn­ing its at­ten­tion to the biotech world. Now, a new part­ner is com­ing in­to the fold show­ing that its in­ter­est in biotech is like­ly to grow fur­ther.
The Sil­i­con Val­ley-based com­pa­ny, which is head­ed up by for­mer Google CEO Er­ic Schmidt, has brought on Joel Dud­ley as a part­ner. Ac­cord­ing to Dud­ley’s LinkedIn page, he is join­ing In­no­va­tion En­deav­ors af­ter serv­ing as the chief sci­ence of­fi­cer of biotech start­up Tem­pus Labs since 2020.
In an in­ter­view with End­points News, Dud­ley said he had al­so been work­ing with In­no­va­tion En­deav­ors in some ca­pac­i­ty for a lit­tle while as a part-time ven­ture part­ner, but now de­cid­ed to jump on full time.
In­no­va­tion En­deav­ors has been slow­ly creep­ing in­to biotech in­vest­ments. While the firm has in­vest­ed in well-known tech en­ti­ties such as SoFi and Uber, it made sev­er­al biotech in­vest­ments last year. This in­cludes par­tic­i­pat­ing in rounds for George Church’s spin­out GRO Bio­sciences, the al­ler­gy biotech Ukko and BigHat Bio­sciences.
Dud­ley told End­points that bring­ing him on showed that In­no­va­tion En­deav­ors is tak­ing a hard­er look in­to the biotech world, and he feels that the re­cent de­vel­op­ments have made it an at­trac­tive land­ing spot.
“You had these trends that were go­ing to hap­pen ir­re­spec­tive of these ex­po­nen­tial tech­nolo­gies in mol­e­c­u­lar pro­fil­ing, imag­ing, da­ta sci­ence and ma­chine learn­ing, all sort of con­verg­ing, ir­re­spec­tive of their in­no­va­tion cy­cle and hit­ting these ex­po­nen­tial in­no­va­tion curves,” he said. “But then ob­vi­ous­ly you have Covid sit­ting on top of that, which was sort of this World War II-like cy­cle of com­pressed in­no­va­tion.
“I think the sec­ond-or­der ef­fects from both the tech­nol­o­gy curves pro­gress­ing as they were and then Covid sort of ac­cel­er­at­ing that,” Dud­ley added.
How­ev­er, Dud­ley crossed paths with an in­fa­mous group while at Mount Sinai — he was part of a team that con­duct­ed one of the stud­ies in­ves­ti­gat­ing Ther­a­nos’ blood tests, which found is­sues with the cho­les­terol read­outs.
Dud­ley said that his ex­pe­ri­ence with Ther­a­nos al­lowed him to ap­ply a stricter sci­en­tif­ic rig­or to any fu­ture in­vest­ments, and demon­strates that In­no­va­tion En­deav­ors is fo­cused on the sci­ence of a com­pa­ny and not just fi­nan­cials.
“This sig­ni­fies that In­no­va­tion En­deav­ors, by bring­ing a quote-un­quote sci­en­tist on board full time, that they want to bring that sci­en­tif­ic rig­or to eval­u­at­ing every sci­ence-based com­pa­ny they eval­u­ate, and I’ll get in there and I’ll pick the tires and get hands-on in the sci­ence and see what seems to make sense,” Dud­ley said to End­points.
While Dud­ley feels that the mar­ket in re­cent months has al­so been a bit cru­el to biotech, he said that it is still worth in­vest­ing as un­met needs re­main. Dud­ley added he be­lieves In­no­va­tion En­deav­ors has more pa­tience in let­ting biotechs and their re­spec­tive tech­nolo­gies de­vel­op and ma­ture to the points that they need but not let­ting it fer­ment too long.
“I think where we sit is a re­al­ly unique bal­ance of the tech in­vestor mind­set where we re­al­ly ap­pre­ci­ate the pow­er and promise of these plat­form tech­nolo­gies, and to al­low them to build and to reach their po­ten­tial,” he said. “But then al­so with the rig­or, we hope to bring off a biotech VC where we do ap­pre­ci­ate the need to fo­cus on as­sets, in­di­ca­tions and tar­gets and have a strat­e­gy re­al­ly crisp and thought out.”
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