With $18 million in new funding, Spring is speeding up our engine for discovering aging therapies
At Spring Discovery we bring together biology, machine learning, and lab automation to accelerate the discovery of therapies for aging. Aging is the greatest risk factor for the most detrimental diseases on earth, and finding therapies holds the potential to dramatically reduce disease. We’re adding a new approach to this search that combines experimental biology and engineering into a high-throughput machine.
We’re honored to announce $18 million in Series A funding from a world-class group led by First Round and General Catalyst, with many add’l existing investors (Laura Deming’s Longevity Fund, Felicis, Caffeinated Capital, and others) alongside a humbling set of newcomers (Zhen Fund, Susa, Village Global, SciFi, and more). With such an ambitious challenge, we’re grateful for this team of long-term supporters aligned in fighting disease.
While an unignorable amount of evidence has piled up that we are able to slow the biological processes of aging in animals, it’s still brutally difficult to run aging experiments. There are two devilish problems:
- It takes a long time for us to age.
- While we’re waiting for #1, we struggle to know what to measure to define an experiment’s success or failure.
This sets the stage as it is today: aging research has surrounded us with incredible, disease-fighting potential— but we’re struggling to translate that potential into therapies. Problem #1 is tough. #2 is tough but solvable.
At Spring, we’ve built a team of expert biologists and engineers and a new, machine learning-driven experimental approach to solve #2 and change the way we translate aging research. We think of our company as an engine— an engine powered by passionate scientists and engineers + lab automation + machine learning — and the engine’s job is to generate better understanding of what changes in our cells and tissues as we age so we can find therapies that reverse those changes.
We’re thrilled with the promise we’ve seen in our first year of coupling our computational tools with wet lab aging experiments. But we’re just getting started — now we’re ramping up all efforts and deploying our machine to screen for drugs.
Only an inclusive and respectful collaboration of the most passionate scientists, machine learning engineers, and drug developers in the world will be up to this challenge.
Spring’s mission is very long-term: dramatically reducing disease by accelerating the discovery of therapies for aging. Want to join an ambitious, growing, and cross-functional team? Reach out — we’re hiring scientists, engineers, lab operators, and more.
To “fighting back against the grim reaper,” together,
-Ben Kamens, CEO and Founder
