LifeMine Therapeutics has raised $188M in a Series E backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, with RA Capital also joining, to restart a fungus-based drug discovery platform it shelved during layoffs last year. Combined with a newly disclosed $75M Series D from November 2025, the company has pulled in $263M in the past nine months.
CEO Gregory Verdine said the round came in three to four times larger than planned after the two billionaires pushed the company to bring the platform back. The earlier round was backed mainly by existing investors GSK and Google Ventures.
The platform sequences genes from 100,000 fungal strains and clusters them by biosynthetic pathway. Within the next month the company will deploy AI agents to sift through 1,200 potential drug targets the process has revealed, a pipeline Verdine describes as an embarrassment of riches spanning multiple therapeutic areas and ripe for partnerships or out-licensing.
Near-term focus stays on LIFE-001, a next-generation calcineurin inhibitor designed to prevent organ transplant rejection without the toxicity of existing drugs. LifeMine plans a phase 1b trial in islet cell transplant patients and a 150-patient phase 2 study in kidney transplantation against tacrolimus early next year, with readouts penciled in for 2027.
Verdine puts the transplant opportunity at $25B to $30B if the drug reaches the market, and says the funding lets the company rehire staff who were furloughed during its austerity period.
The raise is another sign of Silicon Valley money flowing into biotech, months after AI giant Anthropic announced plans to develop medicines of its own.
