Can Venture Capital Help Unlock 'Underdeveloped' Caltech?

An August 26, 2020 dot.LA article by Ben Bergman, discusses how Freeflow, a new pre-seed and seed stage venture firm is exclusively backing Caltech startups focused on human and planetary health.

"The people (of Caltech) are amazing scientists who are not afraid to tackle the hard problems," said Freeflow founder and managing partner David Fleck, who was an early Google employee who has spent the last 20 years tackling big data. "But as I started to spend more time there I realized the ecosystem was somewhat underdeveloped. They needed investors that could help them with capital and help them develop a company."

David Fleck, who started FreeFlow after he sold his online commenting service, Disqus, for a reported $90 million in 2017, hopes to broaden the perception of Los Angeles from a consumer tech hub to a place with the sorts of deep tech companies more commonly associated with where he spent most of his career, Silicon Valley."

For those of you who have been following BioscienceLA, you might know that we share Fleck's #LongLA philosophy. We look forward to collaborating with FreeFlow and its emerging portfolio companies:

• Appia Bio: Developing a stem cell therapy platform for the development of new drugs to treat cancer, which was initially developed in the Caltech lab of professor and Nobel laureate Dr. David Baltimore.

• Entos: Making physics-based machine learning software that maps chemical space to discover promising new molecules for therapeutics, vaccines and diagnostics through a SaaS model.

• Molecular Instruments: Designs and synthesizes kits for quantitative bio-imaging in drug development, clinical pathology and diagnostics and academic research.

You can read the full article here!