Why Does Sam Altman Invest in Retro Biosciences?

The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, invested $180 million in a company trying to delay death. Retro Biosciences is a biotech startup that aims to extend the human lifespan by 10 years. One of the biggest investments made by a single person into a startup that seeks to extend human longevity, this investment was not made public before. However, MIT Technology Review revealed that the entire sum was contributed by the 37-year-old startup guru.

Read this article to understand the significance of Sam Altman’s investment in Retro Biosciences. But before that, let’s know a bit about Retro Biosciences.

About Retro Biosciences

Retro Biosciences was founded by Betts LaCroix. The company is built around aging biology and it aims to increase healthy human lifespan by ten years. This will be intensely challenging and require substantial resources.

As per the Retro official website, “The company identifies ageing mechanisms for which interventions have shown robust proofs of concept in mammals and have a feasible path to translation to humans. They are focused on cellular reprogramming, plasma-inspired therapeutics, and autophagy. All the programs are diversified across the mechanism and development stages.”

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Why did Sam Altman invest in Retro Biosciences?

The founder of Retro Biosciences, Betts LaCroix, was an associate of Sam Altman’s from their time at the startup accelerator Y-combinator. Sam agreed to finance the endeavour and support his friend in developing a company around ageing. Betts once said, “We are fortunate to have initial funding of $180 million, which will take us to our first proofs of concept and secure the operation of the company through the decade.”

Altman claims he has been betting on areas where he believes underlying trends could lead to the relatively quick implementation of technologies that today seem unattainable. That is what happened at the 2015-founded OpenAI. The company spent more than a billion dollars purchasing computer time as it developed its products, taking a sort of machine-learning program known as a transformer and gradually scaling it up. The main thing for Retro is to be a really good bio startup because that is a rare thing,” says Altman. He further continued, “It’s combining great science and the resources of a big company with the spirit of a startup that gets things done. And that is the project for now.”

Retro set up its headquarters in a raw warehouse space near San Francisco just the year before, bolting shipping containers to the concrete floor to quickly make lab space for the scientists who had been enticed to join the company. Also, the company is believed to be a prize to speed up and tighten feedback loops as part of an aggressive mission to reach its goals. 

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