Amplify Bio Manifesto

For over ten years, we’ve built Amplify in service of technical founders. As the growth of cloud computing transformed how software businesses are built, we partnered with the engineers, computer scientists, and hackers who had the vision required to build category-defining infrastructure businesses.

We spend our time in markets where brilliant technical founders have a unique right to win. Hard-earned domain insights are necessary to create enduring value in AI and data products, cybersecurity, and developer tools. But in no other market have we felt this to be more true—and more underappreciated—than in biology.

Here’s why.

The era of digital biology

Cells are not computers. But biology is digital.

Evolutionary pressures sculpt complex functions into living systems over extraordinary time scales. These functions are stored in DNA and implemented as cellular circuits. Life’s information processing capacity has been a continual source of inspiration for computer scientists. Alan Turing obsessed over biology’s capacity for intricate pattern formation. Careful study of biological neural networks gave rise to the Nobel-winning artificial neural networks powering the AI revolution.

Conversely, modern biology wouldn’t be possible without computing. The completion of the Human Genome Project required serious algorithmic innovation. The first AI breakthrough in the natural sciences was in biology: after decades of biochemical research on protein structure prediction, the problem was solved by an AI lab. And now, the same algorithmic advances used to generate natural language and images are being adapted to generate biology.

‍Biological intelligence was the original inspiration for AI researchers. Fittingly, the most promising application of AI in the world of atoms is to decipher biology’s complexity.

This deep relationship between computing and the life sciences—known as Digital Biology—is one of the fastest moving frontiers of modern science. Decades of compounding progress in biotechnology has equipped researchers with tools for reading, writing, and editing DNA that would have been unimaginable even ten years ago. These tools can be used to create datasets purpose-built for learning complex biological functions that have eluded all prior attempts at quantitative description.

‍There are no simple closed-form equations like Newton’s Laws for cells. But we can learn predictive models from rich biological data.

Digital Biology is not just an academic exercise. The life sciences industry is desperately in need of new ideas. Year after year, the cost of developing new medicines increases exponentially. The efficiency of pharmaceutical R&D has steadily declined since 1950, with the number of new drug approvals per billion dollars spent halving each decade. Last year, the average cost to develop a new drug was $2.23 billion.

This incredible decline was not for a lack of effort. Many new discovery technologies were invented, standardized, and scaled over this time period. But clinical success rates have barely budged. Despite exponential increases in the number of molecules we can screen, we are still flying blind, guided only by human intuition in a search space with many orders of magnitude more solutions than there are stars in the observable universe.

Beyond chemical medicines, the first wave of cellular medicines are now in the clinic. We’ve now seen their profound potential. For example, previously treatment-resistant pediatric cancer patients have gone on to live full lives disease-free. But again, we’ve quickly hit the limits of our biological understanding. We are hot-wiring cells whose behavior we can barely predict. To truly unlock the potential of more advanced therapeutic modalities, we are in need of a fundamental paradigm shift.

We need to realize the potential of Digital Biology. To achieve this, we need a new generation of technical founders in the life sciences. In a technological paradigm shift, the scientists and engineers on the frontier understand something that the rest of the world doesn’t. Regeneron wasn’t built by professional executives. It was built by scientists who lived and breathed recombinant DNA technology.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Just as before, a new generation of technical founders are rising up to reimagine what our industry can be.

Many faculty members at top research institutions earned their positions for sequencing a gene. Now, their trainees—who are often just as comfortable developing algorithms and training models as they are pipetting—routinely perturb thousands of genes and sequence millions of individual cells. They uniquely understand where the world is going.

More of these bilingual builders—joining the technical and the scientific—are taking the entrepreneurial leap to start companies than ever before. Equipped with rented lab benches, cheap cloud compute, and tremendous grit, we believe these brilliant technical founders have the potential to build generational companies.

More than 15 years ago, AWS changed the landscape for startups: suddenly it was possible to start a software business without massive fixed costs. The resulting Cambrian explosion of startup creation rocked the public markets (and the world). The same dynamic is set to repeat itself in biology. With powerful new tools at their fingertips, founders can now make unprecedented progress on a seed budget.

More than ever, this new wave of founders needs partners who believe in them and support them from day one, not from the day their traction becomes obvious. They don’t need multi-stage funds, for whom early-stage is a small piece of their massive puzzle. They don’t need generalist funds, for whom bio is interesting only when it’s hot. They need investors who focus on the early stage, backing founders when they’re just people with an idea and need support the most. 

‍We are building Amplify Bio in service of these founders. With $200M exclusively dedicated to early-stage Digital Biology, our singular mission is to identify the next generation of technical leaders in the life sciences and to support their growth.

Backing and believing in early stage technical founders when others didn’t isn’t new for Amplify. This ethos is baked into our firm’s DNA. We started in 2012 with the same nonconsensus idea for developer tools and infrastructure. We bet that the rapid growth of the cloud would fundamentally restructure how businesses were built, and that a new generation of technical founders would lead the charge; not a bunch of MBAs. From the outset, Amplify was founded to support “technical founders who would rather write code than PowerPoint.”

A decade later, the idea that technical founders can build huge businesses in IT is now obvious in retrospect. Our earliest bets, like the technical founders who started Datadog and Fastly, built category-defining infrastructure companies. The same is true in AI. Amplify companies like Modal and Runway are leading the way in establishing how AI gets built and used. 

Our focus on technical founders also led us to biology early on. In 2016, we partnered with Chris Gibson at Recursion to support his mission to scale drug discovery with technology. More recently, we’ve been proud to partner with technical founders in bio like:

• Brandon White and Alex Beatson at Axiom, as they’ve amassed the world’s largest toxicology dataset to digitize critical pre-clinical experiments
• Nima Alidoust and Johnny Yu at Tahoe Therapeutics, as they’ve hyper-scaled single-cell in vivo data generation in pursuit of virtual cell models
• Zvonimir Vrselja and Nenad Sestan at Bexorg, as they’ve industrialized the world’s first ever whole-brain perfusion model
• …and a lot more

And we’re only getting started. With the launch of our first dedicated Bio fund, we are laying the foundation to deliver the same level of experience and deep domain-specific support that technical founders partnering with Amplify have come to expect. At each stage of Amplify’s growth, we’ve selectively expanded both our Investment team and our Build team, which has been carefully crafted to help technical founders rapidly upskill in the commercial and operational expertise. We plan to grow Amplify Bio in the same way. 

If you have a vision to unleash biological progress and unshackle our industry from trading inversely to interest rates, we’re building this firm for you. Our commitment is to arm you with the resources, network, and skills necessary to achieve generational success.

‍It’s time for The Century of Biology to begin in earnest.