Our investment in Mekonos — AI chip technology company tackling cancer

Good AI Capital is excited to announce our investment in Mekonos Inc alongside our friends at Elementum Ventures and Novartis.
A mission-driven organization
With a mission of solving the acutest production challenges for gene therapies, Mekonos immediately caught our attention. Based on our extensive background in drug development, we are quite aware of the pressing shortage of viral vectors — the delivery vehicle for transporting the engineered genes into cells. Viral vectors have also raised concerns around safety and complexity of overall preparation. With the belief that gene therapy offers hope for medical challenges such as cancers, the Mekonos team has come together around the commitment to tackle such delivery challenges for gene therapies, providing hope for new cures for patients and families.
A talented team
When we met Dr. Anil Narasimha, we were instantly impressed. During our very first call, Anil came off as an atypical scientist. A biologist by training, Anil also has a very strong command of the engineering components. With his rare, multidisciplinary background, Anil is able to offer unique insights. Given the team’s ambition in tackling an urgent problem in a very nascent market, Anil’s broad expertise becomes critically important. Together with the support of its distinguished advisors such as Irving Weissman ( father of modern stem cell research ) and Carolyn Bertozzi ( internationally-renowned chemical biologist, shortlisted for the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry ) the Mekonos team bring their cutting-edge expertise in nano-fabrication, microfluidics, AI and gene editing science in tackling the challenges ahead.
The Network Effect
One key consideration for our investment in startups is their potential benefits drawn from our unique partnership model. Mekonos has leveraged a number of rigorous accelerator programs to help accelerate their growth. They were incubated at Berkeley SkyDeck, where we met the team for the first time in person. Mekonos was also part of University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab, which we recently visited and are looking forward to engaging again in the near-future. With these programs, Mekonos brought along their entrepreneurial community to the Good AI network. Through the same network, we are accelerating Mekonos’ development by providing them with access and resources to key strategic institutions and facilities. Good AI also intends to help scale Mekono’s business through our deep connections with the pharmaceutical industry.
Strong Partnerships
Another important consideration for our healthcare investment is the existence of any industry and academic partnership. Whether it is the FDA approval, access to advanced lab facilities, experiment validation or building relevant machine learning models using proprietary data from the industry leaders, these partnerships are critical for the success of an AI healthcare startup. In the case of Mekonos, it has agreements to operate out of the impressive facilities at Stanford University, the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the Berkeley Biomolecular Nanotechnology Center. As a result of its investment in Mekonos, Novartis has also granted Mekonos’ access to its gene therapy production facility. It is no small feat that Mekonos is the first company that gains access to the Novartis’ facility and a host of other valuable services and guidance.
A product-focused healthcare startup
It is important to stress that Mekonos is not a traditional healthcare company where long cycles of development, high research costs and the unpredictability of the FDA approvals are common. Instead, Mekonos operates more like a product company with short, tangible milestones. At its core, Mekonos is a chip company that designs systems and software to enable industrial scale genome editing. Mekonos’ proprietary silicon chip technology accomplishes this through individually controlled nanoneedle structures that deliver the gene editing payloads into target cells. This approach offers a safe, reliable, versatile, scalable and economical just-in-time manufacturing process for users who research, develop or produce gene and cell therapies. With the many years of product development experiences in Enterprise SaaS ( Software-As-A-Service ), we feel very much at home with Mekonos.
The grand plan
Streamlining the production process for gene therapies is only the beginning. The grand plan is to realize the read-write future of the genome. With the cost of sequencing a human genome being dramatically reduced over the last 15 years, we have had the capability to read the entire genome. Coupling this capability with the writing into the genome with a surgical needle precision achieved through advanced machine learning, Mekonos’ technology will have a great impact towards the discovery of blockbuster cell and gene therapy drugs. And because of the higher throughput, this read-write vision will ultimately unlock the most efficient treatments for some of the most challenging diseases and make them available to the masses.
Final Words
From board meetings to weekly technical meetings, we enjoy working closely with the team. We pride ourselves on making sure to be accessible so that we can maximize efforts and resources. Excited about the transformative impact it can bring to the world, Good AI is committed to help build and propel the company to the next level of growth and commercial success.

