TechBio Founders #30: Developing drug pipelines for life extension and age-related disorders with Ivan De Weber, CEO at Cortex Discovery

Beworm is a biotechnological start-up facing the challenge of plastic pollution. Our goal is to develop a biotic recycling process that decomposes polyethylene, a commonly used material, into its building blocks. With the help of selected microorganisms and enzymes, the long hydrocarbon chain of polymers can be split up into shorter fragments, which can be reused as raw materials. This will transform a linear process into a circular process.

Renaissance Fusion is a fusion energy company on a mission to decouple energy from fuels and emissions by building stellarators, the most efficient, steady, and stable fusion reactors on earth.

Verve Ventures is a network and technology-driven venture capital firm headquartered in Switzerland. Founded in 2010, Verve Ventures has grown to more than 45 team members and has become one of the most active venture investors in Europe with over 140 technology and science-driven startups in its portfolio.

Cortex Discovery’s in silico drug discovery platform is based on its leading-edge AI technology which can predict molecule properties in all therapeutic fields. The accuracy of its predictions has been validated in the lab, and rivals that of experiments.

First Spark Ventures is a Deep Tech venture capital fund investing in breakthrough technologies that make the world healthier, safer, and more productive. First Spark Ventures invests in startups that have fundamental technological insights.We look for stellar teams,large accessible markets, and massive sustainable differentiation.

Oracle partners with leading independent software vendors (ISVs) that provide complementary application and technology solutions. Oracle program for ISVs offers a wealth of best practices, lessons learned, and results to share that have transformed—and continue to transform— cloud business. It encompasses Oracle experience migrating more than 60 SaaS-based applications to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). These applications support core enterprise functions across eight industry verticals and more than 199,000 customers across the globe.

BioBox is a software company developing a hybrid Knowledge Graph and LLM system to create a new way for scientists to converse with data, without hallucinations. Fast moving teams in biotech are deploying the BioBox platform to hit R&D milestones in target identification and validation up to 5x faster.

Earlybird Venture Capital focuses on European technology companies. Founded in 1997, Earlybird identifies and backs exceptional early-stage companies on a pan-European basis and supports them through their growth and development phases – providing financial resources, strategic support, and access to an international network & capital markets. With EUR 2 billion under management across all fund streams, 9 IPOs, and 31 trade sales, Earlybird is one of Europe’s most established and active venture capital firms.

Prometheus Life Technologies is a space biology company out of the University of Zurich, specialized in producing organoids in microgravity. Our team is among the world’s most foremost experts in gravitational biology, and has already successfully flown two missions to the International Space Station to grow human tissue organoids, but we are just getting started on our journey to provide health from space for Earth, and to take biotech to new heights.

AI Proteins is a biotech company on a mission to re-imagine protein therapeutics with a novel approach for designing entirely new proteins. Using AI-based design and a high-throughput drug discovery platform, AI Proteins creates de novo proteins optimized for specific therapeutic applications. The AI Proteins platform enables the development of inexpensive, durable, highly specific proteins that have the potential for oral delivery. Additionally, the AI Proteins platform can dramatically accelerate the development of lead therapeutic candidates ready for IND enabling studies.