NewLimit said it has raised $435 million in a Series C round and plans to begin human testing next year for its first therapy aimed at reversing aspects of cellular aging.
The San Francisco-based biotech, founded in 2021, said the round was led by Founders Fund. Other new investors included Thrive Capital, Greenoaks and Quiet Capital, while existing backers such as Kleiner Perkins, Abstract, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, Valor Equity Partners, Eli Lilly Ventures, Human Capital and others also participated.
NewLimit said the financing will support its effort to move what it describes as age-reprogramming medicines into the clinic. The company said it had originally expected it would take more than a decade to reach human trials, but recent scientific results have accelerated that timeline.
The company’s CEO and president, Jacob Kimmel, said a breakthrough prototype showed it could reverse cell age in old human liver cells. That result, according to NewLimit, is what now makes a first human trial possible next year.
NewLimit is developing medicines intended to restore more youthful behavior in old cells through epigenetic reprogramming. The company argues that aging can be altered at the cellular level, a view that departs from older assumptions that aging was largely fixed.
In NewLimit’s telling, reversing cellular age could have implications both for diseases associated with aging and for maintaining health more broadly. The company says that the potential market for such medicines could be much larger than that of many conventional therapies because they may apply across multiple conditions rather than a single disease.
The startup says it has built artificial intelligence and genomics tools to search for medicines that could drive this reprogramming process. It has been applying those tools to programs in metabolic, vascular and immune health.
The first therapy it plans to test in humans is focused on the liver. NewLimit says the treatment has shown the ability to help livers heal more quickly after injury, reduce damage from dietary stress and speed recovery after alcohol consumption in preclinical work.
The company said its upcoming trial will be the first chance to see how liver age reprogramming translates to humans. It also said more therapeutic programs are in development and that it plans to bring a broader portfolio of treatments into clinical testing over time.
Among the company’s founders are Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong, former GV partner and bioengineer Blake Byers, and Jacob Kimmel, who leads the company as CEO and president.
NewLimit framed the funding as support for a long-term effort to develop medicines for aging and add healthier years to life. While the company is still early in its clinical path, the new capital gives it one of the largest recent war chests in the emerging longevity drug sector.
The company said it sees the work as part of a broader project that could have lasting value if the science succeeds, though the clinical and commercial outcomes remain unproven.