Prime Movers Lab Expands Technical Team with Serial Entrepreneur Justin Briggs and New Research Fellows
Choosing good investments requires understanding a startup’s underlying scientific breakthrough and resulting technology enough to identify the risks and help founders manage those risks. Prime Movers Lab’s deep technical and scientific diligence process helps us understand these risks and separates us from other venture capital firms.
To help accelerate our portfolio companies and cultivate new breakthrough opportunities, Prime Movers Lab is excited to announce that we are growing our bench of deep technical experts with the addition of life sciences entrepreneur and investor Justin Briggs and our inaugural class of research fellows: Liza Reed and Mitch Juneau.
Introducing Justin Briggs
For the last 15 years, Justin worked at the nexus of biology, chemistry, and engineering. At Prime Movers Lab, he will work as a venture partner to identify exciting new startups and support our existing portfolio of life sciences and deep technology companies. During his career, Justin has been an operator at nearly a dozen biotech, nanotech, robotics, and software companies with multiple exits and more than $100 million in venture backing. Justin also supported venture creation at startup studios such as Deep Science Ventures and Accele Venture Partners. In all, Justin has developed novel therapeutics and regenerative medicines in disease areas including oncology, neurology, pulmonary, cardiometabolic, autoimmune, orphan, and infectious diseases across ten countries and four continents.
Prior to joining Prime Movers Lab, Justin developed next-generation biologic medicines, novel pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, and other technologies at companies including Antiverse, Tetherex Pharmaceuticals, Accele BioPharma, Autigen, Otologic Pharmaceutics, Pamlico BioPharma, Synereca, Jortan Pharma, Altheus Therapeutics, Crescendo Biosciences, and Southwest Nanotechnologies. Justin co-founded Chorus Labs, SnapLab Technologies, and TomorrowScale Ventures — the help desk for science startups. Knowledgeable across many discovery, development, commercialization, and scaling activities relevant to deep tech and life science companies, Justin received a degree in biomedical sciences from the University of Oklahoma, an MBA with high honors from Oklahoma City University, and is a co-inventor on multiple issued patents.
Prime Movers Lab Fellowship Program
Over the past few years, we have significantly increased our technology landscaping to accelerate our understanding of vastly different verticals and focus on the areas where we see the largest commercial opportunities. Much of this work can be found in our Breakthrough Science Roadmap, thought papers, webinars, and blog posts. As we scale this practice, we have to augment our technical depth to better understand the vast set of opportunities in deep tech investing.
To keep up with these trends, we are announcing the launch of a fellowship program to bring world-class experts to Prime Movers Lab who will help us dive deeper than ever before into the latest scientific advances. The Prime Movers Lab Fellowship Program will last four months and provide an opportunity for fellows to engage with regulators, academia, other investors, and potential portfolio companies. The program will allow Prime Movers Lab to gain a vastly deeper understanding of breakthrough technologies while keeping the firm lean and agile. We hope our fellows gain insights into the venture capital space and further develop their own ecosystems around their existing areas of study. Our first cohort will dive deep into two areas that we feel are critically important for the future: electric grid technologies and water desalination.
Liza Reed will support our electric grid research this quarter. She is the research manager for electricity transmission at the Niskanen Center and is an expert in High Voltage Direct Current, electricity transmission, and technology innovation. Before joining the Niskanen Center, she worked on energy funding at the Great Lakes Energy Institute at Case Western Reserve University, wireless communication technology development at inmobly, and business analysis at Capital One Finance. She holds a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in Engineering and Public Policy and a master’s degree and a bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The Ohio State University.
Our other research fellow joining us this quarter is Mitch Juneau. Throughout his undergraduate research at the University of New Hampshire and Idaho National Laboratory, he has explored fundamental research into aqueous battery chemistries, value metal recovery from electronic waste streams, and novel in situ battery characterization methods. In the fall of 2017, he joined the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Rochester for his Ph.D. study. As a member of the Porosoff Lab studying Alternative Catalysts for Energy Applications, he is investigating novel catalyst materials that would facilitate carbon recycling processes as a means of replacing hydrocarbon feedstocks for industrial use.
If you’re a startup pursuing breakthroughs in the life sciences, electric grid, or water desalination technology and would like to connect with Justin, Liza, or Mitch, shoot us a message here.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in seed-stage companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation and agriculture.
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