Steve Jurvetson's fund Future Ventures invested in US biotech Moonwalk Therapeutics

US fund Future Ventures, owned by a venture capitalist with Estonian roots Steve Jurvetson, invested in US biotech Moonwalk Therapeutics. A €52M round was backed also by Singapore-based Alpha Wave Ventures, US ARCH Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Google Ventures, and YK Bioventures.

Founded in San Francisco in 2022 by Feng Zhang, Alex Aravanis, Justin Valley, and Arash Jamshidi, Moonwalk is an epigenetic discovery platform that develops treatment against diseases, including chronic and aging-related conditions, through drugs that activate beneficial genes or suppress disease-causing genes. To turn on and off genes, the team uses chemical processes, which are called methylation and demethylation.

According to Moonwalk, their technology of changing epigenome allows them to characterize it completely, modify it at multiple sites, and do it very precisely. The technology doesn’t cut the DNA strand and doesn't make permanent changes to the biological building blocks of genes. The startup will use the investment to further development of its platform.

Founded in San Francisco in 2019 by Steve Jurvetson and Maryanna Saenko, Future Ventures focuses on seed- and early-stage companies, with initial checks of between $3M to $6M. The main areas of investment are machine intelligence, sustainable mobility, the future of food, computational biology, high-performance computing, and aerospace. In April 2023, Future Ventures closed its third $200M fund. In 2023 it invested in a US-based solution for warehouse logistics Robust.AI and a Tallinn-based producer of wool packaging Woola.