When a startup called Retro Biosciences eased out of stealth mode in mid-2022, it announced it had secured $180 million to bankroll an audacious mission: to add 10 years to the average human life span. It had 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.
Retro said that it would “prize speed” and “tighten feedback loops” as part of an “aggressive mission” to stall aging, or even reverse it. But it was vague about where its money had come from. At the time, it was a “mysterious startup,” according to press reports, “whose investors remain anonymous.”
Now MIT Technology Review can reveal that the entire sum was put up by Sam Altman, the 37-year-old startup guru and investor who is CEO of OpenAI.
Altman spends nearly all his time at OpenAI, an artificial intelligence company whose chatbots and electronic art programs have been convulsing the tech sphere with their human-like capabilities.
But Altman’s money is a different matter. He says he’s emptied his bank account to fund two other very different but equally ambitious goals: limitless energy and extended life span.
One of those bets is on the fusion power startup Helion Energy, into which he’s poured more than $375 million, he told CNBC in 2021. The other is Retro, to which Altman cut checks totaling $180 million the same year.
“It’s a lot. I basically just took all my liquid net worth and put it into these two companies,” Altman says.
Altman’s investment in Retro hasn’t been previously reported. It is among the largest ever by an individual into a startup pursuing human longevity.
Altman has long been a prominent figure in the Silicon Valley scene, where he previously ran the startup incubator Y Combinator in San Francisco. But his profile has gone global with OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT, software that’s able to write poems and answer questions.
The AI breakthrough, according to Fortune, has turned the seven-year-old company into “an unlikely member of the club of tech superpowers.” Microsoft committed to investing $10 billion, and Altman, with 1.5 million Twitter followers, is consolidating a reputation as a heavy hitter whose creations seem certain to alter society in profound ways.
Altman does not appear on the Forbes billionaires list, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t extremely wealthy. His wide-ranging investments have included early stakes in companies like Stripe and Airbnb.
“I have been an early-stage tech investor in the greatest bull market in history,” he says.
Young Blood
About eight years ago, Altman became interested in so-called “young blood” research. These were studies in which scientists sewed young and old mice together so that they shared one blood system. The surprise: the old mice seemed to be partly rejuvenated.
A grisly experiment, but in a way, remarkably simple. Altman was head of Y Combinator at the time, and he tasked his staff with looking into the progress being made by anti-aging scientists.
“It felt like, all right, this was a result I didn’t expect and another one I didn’t expect,” he says. “So there’s something going on where … maybe there is a secret here that is going to be easier to find than we think.”
In 2018, Y Combinator launched a special course for biotech companies, inviting those with “radical anti-aging schemes” to apply, but before long, Altman moved away from Y Combinator to focus on his growing role at OpenAI.
Then, in 2020, researchers in California showed they could achieve an effect similar to young blood by replacing the plasma of old mice with salt water and albumin. That suggested the real problem lay in the old blood. Simply by diluting it (and the toxins in it), medicine might get one step closer to a cure for aging.
The new company would need a lot of money—enough to keep it afloat at least seven or eight years while it carried out research, ran into setbacks, and overcame them. It would also need to get things done quickly. Spending at many biotech startups is decided on by a board of directors, but at Retro, Betts-LaCroix has all the decision-making power. “We have no bureaucracy,’ he says. “I am the bureaucracy.”
https://tinyurl.com/4zsukek9
https://retro.bio/announcement/
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