They’ve got $70 million, two guys named Ned, and plans to go after early-stage science where other venture capital firms “would fear to tread.”
On Tuesday, Jupiter Bioventures revealed itself as a new VC firm. Led by former NCI Director Norman Sharpless and repeat biotech entrepreneur Nathaniel David — both of whom go by Ned — they plan to fund about 10 ideas and turn them into three successful biotech companies.
The fund already has about five so-called “moons,” or biotech startups, in development. It’s already “de-orbited,” or killed off, three offshoots, David said in an interview. He’s previously co-founded Syrrx, Achaogen, Kythera Biopharmaceuticals and Unity Biotechnology.
“One of the big problems with biotech is that when you start a new company, you have to go to your team and your investors, and you raise your right hand and you say, ‘I swear this project is definitely going to work,'” David said. “Everybody who does biotech knows that biology is fundamentally a black box, and it takes you years and tens of millions of dollars before you get to peer inside that black box to know what’s true.”
The model involves deploying as much as $2.5 million into an idea to see if it has a shot, by trying to reproduce academic experiments to ensure they’re legit, starting some medicinal chemistry work, having a good lawyer evaluate IP, or something else specific to that project, Sharpless said in an interview.
The team will then give a thumbs-up or down. “Half of your projects die at this stage, as they should,” David said. If it gets a go-ahead, Jupiter will invest up to $20 million. They plan to “ruthlessly kill” ideas that don’t work, he said.
By putting a hard limit on that early-stage capital, David said the “quality of what you build goes up.”
Jupiter names its projects after moons in the solar system, and already has five in progress.
Its Ganymede project (named after Jupiter’s largest moon) is working on NRF2-dependent cancers. Deimos (named after an object orbiting Mars) is testing an oral drug for acute radiation syndrome, with a Phase 2 completed and a new drug application expected in 2026. Another startup, Persistence, aims to make CAR-T therapies cheaper. Artemis is making small molecules for cancer.
David went into more detail on Cavalry Biosciences, which he said has been syndicated with Venrock and Mission BioCapital. The company has a pre-IND meeting on Dec. 12 for its lead program in ophthalmology, David said. It expects to start testing in humans next year and again in 2026 with a second drug, according to Jupiter’s website.
“What if we could send a growth factor anywhere in the body, like give it a zip code and send it?” David said of Cavalry. “You could do a lot of things. You could imagine regrowing nerves, regrowing secretory glands, regrowing muscles, and we have programs on each of those.”
Another area of interest is helping with GLP-1-associated muscle loss, which has
become a focus
for the obesity field in recent quarters.
The firm is still working through its first fund and has a few more moons to create, but it is assessing when the time could be right for its next batch.
“If all of a sudden biotech changed dramatically and it was super-easy to raise money — and we wouldn’t be seeing all these great ideas because the first VC who would see some of these ideas would fund them in a different era — would this still be the right thing to do?” Sharpless said. “But assuming that biotech funding will remain difficult, then doing version two of this is something we’re definitely talking about.”
For now, Sharpless is excited to be working on early-stage science again.
“After having this big federal administrative job that was very far away from the science, it was nice to get back closer to actual looking at data and thinking about projects and how you would personalize science,” he said.
Mayo Clinic and Mission BioCapital are Jupiter’s co-founding investors. Other investors include Alexandria Venture Investments, Cedars-Sinai Intellectual Property Company, CU Healthcare Innovation Fund, Bioventure Partners and others.
