Crypto investor-backed LongGame aims to fund technologies with the potential to extend healthy human lifespan by more than 10 years.
New venture capital fund LongGame officially launched today with plans to deploy $40 million to invest in longevity biotech startups over the next four years. The brainchild of British crypto investor and entrepreneur Will Harborne, the fund’s stated mission is to back therapeutics with the potential to increase healthy life expectancy by more than 10 years by targeting the root causes of aging.
Citing areas including stem cell therapies, gene editing and senolytics, LongGame’s investments will mainly concentrate on pre-seed and seed-stage biotech companies. Each venture must demonstrate the potential capability to increase life expectancy by at least a decade, with the broader aim of achieving far greater milestones.
LongGame is also exploring the intersection of biotechnology and decentralized technologies, alongside traditional approaches to biotech funding and development. The fund aims to leverage Decentralized Science (DeSci) initiatives, such as tokenization of intellectual property and decentralized crowdfunding mechanisms, to democratize investment opportunities and introduce liquidity into early-stage longevity research.
Longevity.Technology: Having already made investments inImmuneAge,Vincere Bio,Adaptyv BioandZero Health, LongGame is putting its money where its mouth is, and the emergence of a potential new funding source will be welcome news to many longevity startups. The crypto background of the fund’s founder is reflective of a broader movement in which prominent figures from the tech and crypto sectors, such asCoinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, are investing in longevity. To find out more about the LongGame, why it focuses on “radical” life extension and what makes longevity so attractive to the crypto community, we sat down with the fund’s founder, Will Harborne.
As cofounder of crypto firms rhino.fi and ZKV, Harborne also led blockchain and Ethereum projects at cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex. He believes his background in the crypto space has shaped his perspective on the longevity field, seeing distinct similarities between the two worlds, and their shared mindset of disrupting traditional concepts that are often taken for granted.
LongGame cofounders Will Harborne, Chloe Northcott and Dr Manish Chamoli.
“There’s a significant cultural crossover,” says Harborne. “I was getting into crypto eight or nine years ago and going to a lot of events when it was still a small space. You get the same energy at longevity events – a high conviction in the technologies and the mission behind what these founders are working on.”
Crypto mindset can ‘disrupt’ aging
This shared mindset has attracted an investor base that Harborne is intimately familiar with – high net worth individuals from the crypto space who have made their fortunes betting on the power of disruption.
“A lot of our investors, especially the larger ones, are themselves high net worth individuals from who made a lot of money in crypto or through investing generally,” he explains. “Perhaps that’s because people who think you can disrupt money also think you can disrupt aging.”
When it comes to disrupting aging, Harborne is keen to emphasize LongGame’s focus on the radical side of things.
“We define radical life extension as more than 10 years in healthy human life extension,” he explains. “It’s about pushing lifespan beyond what’s currently possible with today’s technologies. This means looking at new biotech that can make a meaningful jump in lifespan, not just incremental improvements.”
But Harborne is quick to add that the fund’s investment thesis goes beyond simply chasing more years.
“We don’t want just lifespan for the sake of lifespan, and there’s a big crossover between healthspan and lifespan,” he says. “What we do want is to look at those companies that are really trying to push the envelope of aging biology, and I think that will then translate through to healthy lifespan improvements for a lot of people, rather than just keeping people alive.”
Seeking impact for billions of people
This emphasis on equitable access is a key tenet of LongGame’s approach. Harborne believes that the true impact of radical life extension will only be realized if these therapies can be made available to the broader population, not just the wealthy elite.
“It shouldn’t just be about a small number of people living longer – it should be our entire society can benefit from that economically,” he explains. “The most interesting investments we see are therapies with a huge market opportunity, which billions of people around the planet can one day use.”
To that end, LongGame is particularly interested in technologies that can become low-cost and be integrated into mainstream healthcare systems.
“Gene therapies, for example, are a good example where costs have the potential to get very low,” says Harborne. “Some stem cell therapies seem to be working today, but they are really expensive, so the kind of things we’re interested in are companies working on technologies that can massively bring those costs down.”
Long term focus, short term opportunities
Of course, the long-term nature of radical life extension research presents its own set of challenges for investors. Many longevity therapies may require decades of clinical trials before they can be commercialized, which can be a tough sell for those seeking quicker returns.
But Harborne sees this as an opportunity rather than a roadblock. He believes that by identifying companies with near-term commercialization potential alongside their long-term life extension goals, LongGame can create a “flywheel” effect – generating near-term revenue that can then be reinvested into the more radical, long-term plays.
“There are quite a few companies within the space who, although they’re classified as longevity biotechs, and that is their long-term goal, have much shorter-term commercial opportunities,” says Harborne. “That could be that they’re going to spin off licensing for other applications or that they’re generating very valuable IP which no one else is really working on, because they’re working on that long term challenge.”
To qualify the best investment opportunities, Harborne will work with LongGame’s Chief Scientific Officer, Dr Manish Chamoli, who has worked in aging biology and research at the Buck Institute for the past 15 years, as well as the fund’s special advisor, Healthspan Capital cofounder Sebastian Brunemeier.
Beyond the classic biotech approach, Harborne says that LongGame is also interested in investing in “enabling” technologies, such as AI and protein engineering platforms. The fund recently invested in Adaptyv Bio, which is building a platform to accelerate the design and testing of new therapeutic proteins.
Funding is the issue, not regulation
While regulatory hurdles are often cited as a major challenge in the longevity space, Harborne is less concerned about this aspect. He believes that once therapies are proven scientifically rigorous, the regulatory approval process will follow.
“It’s not like we have hundreds of companies with meaningful lifespan extension therapies ready to go, and they just can’t get approved from a regulatory point of view,” says Harborne. “I think when we do have those, and we can show that they work in a scientifically rigorous way, I think they’ll get approved. But I think it’s more of problem that we don’t have those therapies really solved yet and ready.”
Instead, Harborne believes there is another, more significant, obstacle holding back progress in radical life extension.
“The number one issue in longevity is funding,” he says. “And that’s partly why we set up LongGame – to make sure that funding goes to the companies taking approaches that can scale, and which can have a meaningful impact. And then I think the regulatory problem will, in theory, get solved as those companies mature and prove themselves.”