Dominic Falcão

@MissionZeroTech has launched the UK's first plant that extracts CO2 from the air and converts it into jet fuel 🤯 Magic? Nah. Science! Mission Zero is part of the DSV portfolio, and we are very happy to see this landmark being shared by @SkyNews! dsv.vc/48cX2ij

Pushing The Frontiers of Human Cell Manufacturing— Mytos (@mytosbio) Announces $19M Series A Exclusive announce written by @matthewjgood Earlier this week, I hopped on Zoom for a pre-funding announcement chat with Ali Afshar (@Ali110Afshar), CEO and cofounder of Mytos. Founded 5 years ago, Mytos’s team has developed and built an entirely new way to fully automate human cell manufacturing, solving one of the most critical bottlenecks in biotech innovation. Check out their full press release here. I asked Ali a few questions about: - Raising their Series A - Why Mytos’s solution is unique - How they’ll market, and how he’s assembling a team to build a generational biotech company. Accelerating into the market For Mytos, this Series A is all about accelerating more quickly into the market. They’re seeing classic signs of PMF—many of their clients come from organic, unprompted referrals—and this round will help them build out the team necessary to accelerate into the market. Right now, Mytos is already live with multi-billion dollar biotechs and pharmaceutical companies on both sides of the US coasts. By the end of this year, they aim to be live in one of the top 10 pharma companies. Partnering with Buckley Ventures Based in SF, Buckley Ventures led Mytos’s Series A round. They were joined by IQ Capital and Wing VC. In Ali’s words, Buckley Ventures has “very strong founder energy, led by Josh himself, who’s a multiple-time founder (Mino Games) and executive (former CEO of Product Hunt). Jonathan, who worked directly on our deal, has the same energy. We want people around the table at Mytos who possess the same vision and ambition.” As they push harder and faster to advance the entire field of cell automation, Ali and his team are intent on partnering with investors who can match their vision and ambition. How it all started Ali’s journey to cofounding Mytos stems (pun intended) from directly experiencing the problem the company now solves. Ali’s background is in physics, hardware, and software, and early in his career he spent hours in the lab. Lab work is generally tedious and time-consuming, so Ali tried speeding things up by building robots to automate his work (he actually founded his own hardware company, Vellium Devices). Building automation tools began saving him hours of time each day. “I’d been bitten by ‘the founder bug,’” he says, “and my thoughts kept coming back to how—if we could automate processes that happen in the lab—we could accelerate research and potentially create something new that’d also have commercial value.” So Ali began asking companies like GSK and Pfizer about “the most important processes they wanted to automate in their labs.” The answer was consistent: cell manufacturing. Cell manufacturing is one of the costliest, time-consuming tasks within the overall process of creating new drugs, for a variety of reasons: Cell manufacturing relies heavily on manual labor, with zero room for error. For instance, Ali explained: “Say you take the lid off a flask, and your arm then travels vertically over that flask. Some particles will invariably fall out of your arm and contaminate the cell. The whole process is grueling, uncomfortable, and immensely time-intensive.” If you contaminate your cells, you’ll delay experiments by weeks, sometimes months. This costs millions of dollars to companies investing in R&D, and mistakes during the manual cell manufacturing delays potentially life-saving drugs from reaching patients who need them. Manual cell manufacturing also doesn’t produce high-quality data, and the cells' quality isn’t always uniform. In the past, researchers and scientists have tried solving these problems with robotic arms. To date, it hasn’t worked. “Invariably,” Ali says, “the robot will break, or you’ll come back over the weekend and see that something got knocked over, or your cells were contaminated somehow.” Building a new system At Mytos, Ali and his team spent the last 6 years building an entirely new system that automates the cell manufacturing process from the ground up. The thing that struck me the most about their process? Obsession with the customer experience (more on that later). The upshot is this: Mytos’s system elegantly integrates all the different technologies necessary to grow cells (intricate fluidics, aseptic connectors, high-performance microscopy, temperature control, and more) into a product that’s incredibly easy to use. Plus, it’s easy to control from your phone, so scientists don’t need to constantly live in the lab over weekends, ensuring their cells grow correctly. All data is captured and stored in the cloud, easily accessible via a simple mobile and web app interface. With Mytos, scientists don’t need to drive into the lab on a weekend just to look at their cells. Instead, they can track growth rate, and see images taken at various times during cell development—all via a slick web interface. When it's time to harvest your cells, Mytos sends you a notification. If you’re ready, you hit “confirm,” and Mytos immediately begins harvesting your cells based on the amount of density selected. Then you simply go back to the lab, detach the cells (which are now in a bottle in the machine), and walk away. They’ve shrunk down a process that used to take hours into a true “set it and forget it” system. Problems/use cases that Mytos solves Ali broke down their GTM approach into 2 main, “complementary” markets: 1. Manufacturing cells for drug development Today, drug development and testing happens on cells, animals, then humans. The initial cells in this process are manufactured by hand, which creates a massive bottleneck at the start of the entire process. Mytos automates this process, accelerating the drug's development. From a patient perspective, this speed matters immensely. Hundreds of thousands of people die from diseases each year. Although drugs can solve only a fraction of those deaths, automating cell manufacturing for drug development dramatically increases the amount of drugs that can come to market. This, in turn, can save hundreds of lives. From an economic perspective, large pharmaceutical companies lose massive amounts of revenue when a drug is delayed getting to market. And, with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, companies are further incentivized to move even faster. In the past, companies enjoyed, on average, around 15 years of patent protection on new drugs that they took to market (i.e. time to recoup their R+D costs). The IRA shortens that time period to around 7 years, which means companies need to move fast “to queue up the next viable drug before they lose patent protection on the previous one.” Companies are also incentivized to use Mytos to manufacture cells for drug development because doing so allows them to use more realistic cells before human trials. Ali explained that—despite how hard it is for a drug to advance to human trials—90% of drugs still fail at this stage. That’s because testing on animals often isn’t realistic enough. To more quickly (and safely) bring drugs to market, companies need to grow more realistic human cell-based models. To date, this hasn’t been possible because of the sheer labor costs of manually manufacturing cells. Mytos changes this entire equation, enabling their customers to grow more and more realistic cell models. Eventually, Ali explained, they’re aimed at creating more complex 2D cells, tissues, and organs. Manufacturing cells for cell therapy Cell therapy is when you use a patient’s own cells to treat his/her disease. The most famous form of this treatment is known as CART. With CART: - You take an immune cell from a patient - Genetically modify it to recognize a certain cancer - Grow a batch of those cells - Give them back to the patient So far, Ali told me, this type of treatment has been approved for about 10% of cancers. But many scientists predict that by 2030 this percentage will increase dramatically—which will increase demand for human cell manufacturing. Another example is Parkinson’s: you can take a patient’s skin cells, transform them back into stem cells, turn those stem cells into brain cells, grow a batch of brain cells, and then deliver them to your patient as a treatment for Parkinson’s. For all of these cell therapies, Ali explained, Mytos’s technology automates a once-manual process. Ali emphasized their long-term approach to tackling both these markets: “We’re taking this never-ending trajectory where first we’ll manufacture cells to treat illnesses like cancer, Parkinson's, etc. Then, maybe in a decade's time, we’ll do skin and hair cells. Maybe one day we can do full organs.” How customers respond to Mytos They love it. And they spontaneously refer others to Mytos. Ali told me that many of Mytos’s leads and deals come from customers who jump on the phone and tell other companies: “Hey, you’ve got to work with these guys.” Today, Ali said, they’re producing and selling their machines as fast as possible. Raising this Series A will help them expand the team and drive further into the market. Right now, they’re hiring for roles like: - Software engineers — critical to Mytos’s success, since the machine's data analytics, user interface, and “brains” of the product all run on complex software. - Hardware engineers — to build the next versions of the machine itself. - Biologists — to develop further applications for Mytos’s product, including more protocols to grow different types of cells. Life at Mytos? (spoiler: you should apply!) For Ali, the bottom line is “building a company where people do the best work of their lives.” Working at Mytos means: - Exposure to a multidisciplinary, versatile team of elite operators, engineers, and scientists with disparate backgrounds. - In-person work at their office in London, where all the action happens. - Developing some of the bleeding-edge technology in biotech and cell manufacturing. Ali credits their in-person offices as creating the team’s deep sense of camaraderie: “Sometimes I might be upstairs working on something late at night, and a group of people come up from downstairs and tell me about this massive problem they just solved…it was really hard, but they solved it. And then we can all celebrate together. It’s exciting.” Obsessing over the customer “[In the early days], we literally strapped GoPros to scientists and filmed them doing their work. This allowed us to iterate on the user experience repeatedly until we created an incredibly easy-to-use product. Even when our team was just 4 people in a basement, we constantly found ways to iterate on the customer experience.” Ali credits Ignacio Willats, his cofounder, with driving this customer obsession from the early days: “When we were just four people in the basement, Igancio constantly contacted companies to improve our technology. He convinced a VP at late-stage biotech from the Bay Area to fly to London, test our product, and eventually sign up. From the early days, we’ve been continually iterating with customers. We use that data as a point of truth, and we’ve worked to instill that mindset in our team. So for example: our development team also deploys the products with real customers. That means they’ll jump on a plane, go help the customer set up, gather feedback, then return to London with tons of energy and insights.” Ultimately, Ali told me, “Our focus is to build the simplest technology we can.” He pushes his team to “find boring solutions”—the product solution that delivers value to the customer in the quickest, easiest way. This ethos has led to normal day-to-day scientists becoming so comfortable with Mytos’s product that they train other people to use it, without help from the Mytos team. For a company solving such a highly technical problem, this is a rare (and refreshing!) take. “We believe in hiring the smartest people we can find” Nearly a 3rd of the company has been hired via referral. Ali told me: “We spend a lot of time asking the smartest people in our network about the smartest people they know, and then we chased them down (sometimes for years, if necessary) until we convinced them to join.” Why index on this level of talent? “Because it's addictive to constantly be around smart, hard working colleagues.” Additionally, Ali believes in hiring the smartest people and giving them real agency in terms of decision-making. It's one of the ways they optimize for speed to execution. Ali and his cofounders constantly push their team to ask: “How can we do things faster than their normal, natural timeline?” This is what he calls the Mytos concept of “micro-speed.” “Things that would normally take 2 weeks, we try and figure out how we can get them down today or tomorrow. Because the more we accelerate, the faster our customers can create and take life-saving drugs to market—drugs that can positively impact the lives of hundreds, even thousands, of people.” How you can start using Mytos Book a call right from the Mytos website. Ali’s team works closely with each customer to determine how to best automate their workflow with our machine. Some ways customers are currently using the product: - Creating stem cells - Cancer drug development - Neurodegenerative disease side Pushing hard, pushing forward At the end of our call, Ali and I spoke about his ethos behind building world-changing products. In his mind, technological progress isn’t inevitable. It requires people to dedicate their lives to pushing hard, and pushing forward. “One of the responsibilities as a leader is helping the team realize just how much we can get done in a period of time, and why that matters. Once they start proving it to themselves, then the entire company starts thinking more ambitiously and moving quickly.” In Ali’s mind: “Ultimately, the only laws you can’t break are the laws of physics. So if it’s possible within the laws of physics, you can find a way of making it happen, right?” This is exactly the kind of ethos we believe in at S3. We’re proud to cover Ali and Mytos, and congratulate them on their Series A raise! We can’t wait to watch them push the frontiers of cell manufacturing.

As co-founders of the @GlobalTalentLab, @Patrick_Gaule and I are delighted to announce the #BIGProgram. The #BIGProgram aims to serve as the catalyst that transforms potential into progress. Through our scholarships, we are equipping exceptional talents who excel in International Science Olympiads to redefine the frontiers of science and technology. Our future hinges on the minds we cultivate today.

Meet the 20 seed-stage European companies that are reshaping the future of cancer care in our new ranking, sponsored by @DebiopharmNews. 👉 sifted.eu/rankings/the-e…

We’re thrilled to be partnering with @DeepSkyCorp to use our direct air capture (DAC) technology to scale #carbonremoval in Canada. Using 💧 water + ⚡️ renewable energy to permanently remove CO₂ from the atmosphere. bit.ly/3EQPuF7 #climateTech #ClimateAction