OpenAI’s Sam Altman invested in a bioscience aging startup
OpenAI’s Sam Altman rose to fame after releasing ChatGPT late last year, but another area of technology has also piqued his interest. The tech entrepreneur has invested $180 million in a company that aims to defy age and extend human lifespans. MIT Technology Review reported Wednesday.
Retro Biosciences, a San Francisco-based biotech company, announced in April 2022 that it had secured funding for an ambitious mission: Add 10 years to “healthy human life expectancy”. Despite the disclosure of their multi-million dollar funding, the source of that funding has remained anonymous until now – it all came from Altman. Retro’s website simply states, “We are fortunate to have $180 million in initial funding that will take us to our first proofs of concept and keep the company running for the decade.”
Altman’s investment in Retro in 2021 is one of the largest investments by an individual in an anti-aging startup. MIT Technology Review reported. The company’s founders are biotech veterans. Joe Betts-LaCroix has advised several startups and founded two research-based startups. Sheng Ding is a Senior Investigator at the Gladstone Institute, known for biomedical research, and has founded four other companies. And Matthew Buckley has a background in biotech and healthcare companies, Illumina and Bayer Healthcare.
Betts-LaCroix was also a part-time partner at Y Combinator, a startup incubator that Altman ran from 2014 to 2019. Altman first became interested in health research after reading about studies in which old mice were resuscitated with the blood of young mice. He later joined forces with Betts-LaCroix to start a company exploring various aspects of aging and biology.
Retro is Altman’s first major investment in biotechnology, but not his first major technology investment. In 2021, he poured $375 million into a fusion energy startup called Helion Energy, which aims to produce limitless clean energy.
“That’s a lot. I basically just took all my liquid assets and put them into these two companies,” Altman said MIT Tech Review.
Retro rejected wealth‘s request for comment. OpenAI did not return immediately wealth‘s request for comment.
In 2019, Altman became CEO of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research company. First, the company developed an AI art tool called DALL-E (unveiled in 2021) that could create a whole array of images from text prompts. And then, last November, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, an internet-renowned chatbot that can have human-like conversations with its users, answer questions in seconds, and churn out amazingly detailed content from seemingly simple instructions.
Altman isn’t the only Silicon Valley entrepreneur interested in health and longevity. Peter Theil donated millions to the nonprofit Longevity Foundation in 2006, predicting “dramatically improved health and longevity for all.” Calico Life Sciences, a company focused on aging research, has been backed by high-profile investors including Google’s parent company Alphabet. And Altos Labs, a company reportedly backed by tech moguls like Jeff Bezos, announced it had received a $3 billion investment in early 2022. Their stated mission is to reverse disease, injury and disability throughout human life. Even the Saudi government said it would invest $1 billion annually to find ways to slow the aging process.
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs were also personally high-profile dilettantes when it came to health and longevity. Bryan Johnson, 45-year-old tech CEO, has spent over $2 million on drugs and treatments since early 2023 to try to look like an 18-year-old. He has dedicated doctors monitoring the aging process in his organs and tracking metrics like his body fat percentage and heart rate.
“The whole realm of longevity goes into a much more rigorous, clinical realm,” said George Church, a geneticist at Harvard University Bloomberg.
In addition to investing millions in the longevity startup, Altman participates in his own age-reversing rituals. He reportedly tries to eat a healthy diet, exercises regularly and takes the diabetes drug metformin, which is believed to increase longevity.
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