“I am prepared to say that our approach is fairly unique if we compare it to the normal venture capital industry practice. The venture capital fund LongeVC has created its own accelerator. This means that from time to time LongeVC will define verticals that we see the biggest potential in. We will address professionals that have applied to the program. We will help to form the team and add additional competencies,” explains LongeVC venture capital fund partner Sergey Jakimov.
Applications will be selected on a rolling basis. Applicants should fill in a very simple form on the LongeVC website (https://longevc.com/#acceleration) to prove their expertise in the field. However, the amount of previous experience doesn't matter - experts will create diverse teams by combining different levels of knowledge and the expertise of team members.
“Our team believes that the next longevity unicorn can be built from the ground up. LongeVC regularly identifies a promising technological area, which, in our mind, will grow significantly in coming years. We also believe that outstanding individuals can be united into teams to work on building groundbreaking products and technologies in these areas. We, therefore, encourage individual founders with a biotech background to apply, sharing their ideas around a proposed tech area,” says Jakimov.
Also, venture capital fund LongeVC will continue to look for startups in the longevity industry at the seed-early A stage. The fund is willing to invest in teams already formed and MVP concepts that need an initial injection of capital and industrial expertise from the insider. Applications are open.
“There are plenty of promising projects on the market and most of them are not receiving the necessary level of support that would allow them to develop. It is therefore extremely important to identify and onboard such projects early on. And that is what accelerator programs are for. One of the key areas for us is AI for drug discovery and AI for predictive diagnostics, where it is very important to give teams access to industrial expertise and high-quality data subsets from the start, ensuring quality product development and thus preventing market lag,” says LongeVC Venture Partner, private investor, and philanthropist, Rustam Gilfanov.
The total amount of the money available from the venture capital fund LongeVC is EUR 35 million. The fund is targeting seed-stage and pre-A funding round companies because there are limited opportunities worldwide to secure investments during these stages. LongeVC has a strong focus on companies working with solutions in longevity and biotechnology. Top-notch experts in the longevity field have already joined a team as advisors and are available to startups. LongeVC is already collaborating with anti-aging pioneer, one of the most renowned gerontologists, holding a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, author of more than 290 publications Aubrey De Grey, founder of Deep Longevity, Inc. and Adjunct Professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging Alex Zhavoronkov (Ph.D.), as well as many others.