1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sergey Jakimov, Co-Founder and Partner at LongeVC (Part 1)

Sergey Jakimov is Co-founder and Partner at LongeVC, a firm focused on the Longevity space. We discuss trends and opportunities in this sector full of whitespaces waiting for the entrepreneur’s magic touch.

Sramana Mitra: Give us a little bit of an introduction about your background as well as about LongeVC.

Sergey Jakimov: I do have an atypical background for how I ended up in venture capital. I’m active in biotech, but I don’t have the education from the biotech field. I come from the quantitative background. I took the entrepreneurship journey quite early.

I was 22 years old when I built my first company, which was in engineering. I started off from what we call now as deep tech commercialization. My first company was in computational food dynamics. It was heavy science. Then I went into life sciences because that’s where I saw the most purpose in value creation.

I then started my second company, which was a medical devices company. Together with a team of engineers, we figured out a way to manufacture customizable things for orthopedic and dental implants. It allows faster healing after surgery.

I thought I would increase my exposure to pharmaceuticals. This is where I took a deep dive into working with other startups for three or four years. I spent most of my time with cardiovascular neurogenerative companies in pre-clinical stages where I helped them fundraise and define their IP protection strategies. After doing this for several years, I built another company together with partners. That one was in digital health, specifically in patient recruitment and engagement.

It wrapped up in LongeVC as the venture capital vehicle. We have three partners. The focus is around the longevity sector. There is a lot of misunderstanding about it publicly. It’s now a separate piece of biotech that’s exploding in exposure and weight. Longevity is one of the fastest growing areas in biotech. We look at longevity in a pragmatic way.

We are looking at investing in the therapeutic vertical where we are investing in early stage disease-modifying therapies that relate to age-related diseases. This is where we spend most of our time with immune oncology and neurodegenerative space.

The other vertical is non-therapeutic. Non-therapeutics is early diagnostics as well as digital health and data-driven approaches when it comes to age-related diseases. This includes AI for drug discovery. It also includes all areas of patient empowerment, patient engagement, and speeding up of certain clinical processes as well as all sorts of early stage diagnostics. We can talk about digital or biological markers. Both work.

Holistically, we understand longevity as technologies that allow us to maintain our healthy human performance for a longer period of time. It’s not about extending the human life or the possible human lifespan. We are after systematically removing or tackling risks that make us decline. This is the investment focus. It is an early stage fund with a size of 35 million euros. That said, we have a global mandate. We invest across the US. We invest across Europe, so we don’t have any geographic constraints.

Sramana Mitra: Are you based in Europe?

Sergey Jakimov: We put the fund together when COVID hit. The whole setup, by default, was decentralized. Our analysts are everywhere starting from Bay Area all the way to Germany. We’re in both parts. The partners are Latvian-born. We spend a lot of time here, but, as we speak, both my partners are in Miami for a conference. I’m talking to you out of Europe.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sergey Jakimov, Co-Founder and Partner at LongeVC
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