QB3 “4×4” Pitch Session with UC Berkeley Shared-Carry VC Funds Draws a Crowd

By Bella Liu.

Berkeley is the #1 university for venture-backed startups for many reasons. One reason is that the campus has nine affiliated VC funds which operate on the “shared-carry” model of investing in spinoffs and returning a stream of profit to campus. Recently we convened a “4×4” pitch session bringing four of these funds together at once to hear presentations from four companies participating in QB3 entrepreneurship programs. The event drew a large crowd of Berkeley students, postdocs, and faculty, as well as entrepreneurs and investors from the wider ecosystem.

Representatives from the California Innovation Fund, Courtyard Ventures, BEVC, and the new Chancellor’s Fund heard pitches from the founders of Gilly, Ambrosia, Opus Biosciences, and Editpep.

Representing Gilly, co-founder and CEO Bo Xu spoke about his company’s plans to improve the palatability and nutritional value of feedstock for animals by growing fungi on agricultural waste to produce a kind of tempeh. Already in California, for example, dairy farmers who gave their cows Gilly-made tempeh (which has higher protein content and better digestibility) have seen improved production and quality of milk. By leveraging existing composting infrastructure, Gilly is innovating a greener, most cost-effective way to sustain animal agriculture. “We’re operating in a realm of unit economics which has never been explored in fungal biotechnology,” Xu said.

Niren Murthy, a UC Berkeley professor of bioengineering and member of the Innovative Genomics Institute spoke about Opus Biosciences’ mission to power new and safer single dose/chronic re-dose mRNA therapies. Murthy, Opus’s scientific co-founder, discussed the company’s lipid nanoparticles which deliver therapies (like mRNA vaccines) without triggering toxic cytokine release as conventional lipid nanoparticles do. Opus plans to make the liver their primary target. “We think there are a lot of unmet needs there,” Murthy said.

Dana Foss, CEO and co-founder of Editpep (read our recent profile here), rounded out the presentations to discuss what she called “solving the CRISPR delivery problem.”

“The thing that prevents CRISPR from being in all the drugs that are being prescribed already is that it is a very challenging molecule to deliver into human cells,” Foss said. “CRISPR is very unlike other drugs. You only want a little bit in there, and then you want it to go away because you don’t want sustained expression.”

Editpep is developing a novel biologic that contains a purified CRISPR enzyme and a guide RNA which combine, in Foss’s words, to “trick” the enzyme into behaving like a virus, thereby allowing it to find specific DNA mutations, cut them, and fix them. “Most drugs, you have to completely redose often because they’re treating the symptoms. In our case, we are fixing the mutation that underlies the disease in a potentially one dose treatment,” Foss said. Editpep has ongoing therapeutic programs in Huntington’s disease, Dravet syndrome, and solid tumors.

The event concluded with a networking social hour, allowing attendees to bounce ideas off of the panelists and with each other. As Darren Cooke, UC Berkeley’s interim chief entrepreneurship officer, representing the Chancellor’s Fund, said, “It’s exciting to invest in companies that are coming out of Berkeley. There’s nothing else quite like it, so we’re super excited.”