Prime Movers Lab Team Spotlight: Justin Briggs

Justin Briggs joined Prime Movers Lab last year as our resident biologist and life sciences partner. Justin is a scientific entrepreneur and investor working at the nexus of biology, chemistry, and engineering to accelerate our portfolio companies and cultivate new breakthrough opportunities. Over the last 15 years, Justin was an operator at nearly a dozen biotech, nanotech, robotics, and software companies with multiple exits and over $100 million in venture backing. Justin also supported venture creation at startup studios such as Deep Science Ventures and Accele Venture Partners. Justin developed novel therapeutics and regenerative medicines in disease areas including oncology, neurology, autoimmune, cardiometabolic, and infectious diseases across ten countries and four continents. Currently, Justin serves on the board of directors for Elevian, Iridia, and Iviva Medical and is a board observer at Morphoceuticals and Dimension Inx.

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, Otologic Pharmaceutics, Pamlico BioPharma, Synereca, Jortan Pharma, Altheus Therapeutics, Crescendo Biosciences, and Southwest Nanotechnologies. Justin co-founded TomorrowScale Ventures and startups Chorus Labs, SnapLab Technologies, and Patch Botanics. Justin has 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.

We recently caught up with Justin to talk about what he looks for when speaking to startup founders and what makes a good board member. Read the entire interview below:

You previously worked at nearly a dozen biotech, nanotech, robotics, and software companies with multiple exits. How does being an operator help you as an investor?

Countless ways. Operational experience for investors should be table stakes. It makes you better able to see challenges before they arise and navigate when they do. Being in the trenches gives a person perspective you can never get from the other side of the table. There’s also an important speed element — how quickly can you assess a startup team if you’ve never been on one? Having been on both sides of the table, I have more and more empathy and respect for entrepreneurs and those investors who support breakthrough science. We need more of both to achieve substantive progress.

You’ve worked with or interacted with many VC firms throughout your career. What makes Prime Movers Lab so unique?

The focus on scientific entrepreneurs. Full stop. Prime Movers Lab was built for founders whose startups have the potential to transform industries. Their products could impact billions of lives in meaningful ways, measurable by real metrics like quality-adjusted life years (QALY’s), carbon removal, or levelized cost of energy (LCoE). We are wired differently and resonate with these founders. Having technical operators as an investment team means that PML meets founders on their level. We can get to that fundamental understanding of the vision. Each has experience relevant to provide feedback or navigate hurdles, and the empathy that what they’re doing is incredibly hard. The ability to dig in and work alongside the founders and really swim in their waters is a superpower as an investor. There are plenty of smart people wearing investor hats, but not enough wearing work boots, lab coats, or safety goggles.

What scientific breakthroughs on the horizon are you the most excited about?

I’m less excited about one specific thing expected to come soon and more excited about new functionality and capabilities. For human augmentation, like many other domains, we are riding waves of convergence where unrelated advances enable new capabilities previously impossible or infeasible: smaller sensors, larger datasets, faster processors, cheaper sequencing, rapid fabrication, bioprinting, nanoscale resolution, atomically precise manufacturing. We have entered biotechnology’s kaizen moment. Continuous improvement — from the Japanese *kaizen* in manufacturing — is the constant practice of evaluating, learning, and iterating. Applying directly to biomanufacturing, in recent years, we have seen new biological products, synbio platforms, bioreactor startups, novel viral and non-viral vectors, and tremendous growth in the number and variety of biological and biochemical products. But serious challenges remain for the bioeconomy. Accelerated by the pandemic, the industry’s bioreactor technology has improved somewhat but has not scaled well vertically. Ten thousand liters is simple with anaerobic fermentation, but challenging to get high yields for mammalian production. We have seen a massive horizontal expansion of steel and single-use plastic driven by the explosion in demand for biologically-derived medicines and materials. The drive toward continuous and cell-free manufacturing is only beginning to gain ground. We will be looking for companies with clear step-change benefits backed by data and detailed and thorough techno-economic analyses (TEAs) demonstrating that the startup understands both the requirements and the needs of the product and patient/customer, a tight grasp on both the science and the business, and proof points that show their ability to work with partners and collaborate at each stage and scale. Founders need to clearly drive benefits that are not 3–10x better; they are 100–100,000x improved across key measures such as speed, cost, or probability of success.

You’ve become a valuable board member for a number of our portfolio companies. What is the most valuable thing that a board member can provide?

Tough love and genuine support. There’s a saying that anyone can give you feedback, but good friends will tell you unpleasant truths. Being able to talk about hard things between breaths of congratulations, technical roadmaps, or partner negotiations is necessary.

What are your passions outside of work?

Spending as much time with my family as possible. Playing, reading, and just messing around. Lots of music in our house. I toured years ago and still noodle whenever possible; mostly guitar, piano, or ukulele. I also enjoy making art and the craft of woodworking — designing and building with a combination of organic and inorganic materials is something I haven’t been able to do lately but really enjoy!

Have you read anything lately that inspired you or you think would interest our founders/LPs?

I usually try to read one for fun and one to learn at any given time. To learn, I recently read The Tools by Phil Stutz, which I really enjoyed. Personal development is really important for founders and so is learning different strategies and tactics to help level up myself and others. For fun, I read fantasy and sci-fi novels and history of science books. Right now, even though it’s non-fiction I’m loving A Second Kind of Impossible: The Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter by Paul J. Steinhart, which describes the discovery of quasicrystals and is a wonderful read.

Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.

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