How R42 VC Is Combining Its Portfolio to Build One Unified Longevity Solution
- Zofia Krajewska
- Aug 12
- 7 min read
Updated: Aug 21
R42 operates like a traditional venture capital firm on the surface, backing startups at the intersection of longevity and AI. But, beyond that, they’re doing something very different: assembling their portfolio companies into one multi-intervention longevity platform, including AI drug discovery, CRISPR, mitochondrial bioreactors, biomarker wearables, senescent cell clearance, and ketone supplements.
They’re entering this integrated system into the $101 million XPRIZE for Healthspan, a global competition focused on reversing aging across muscle, cognition, and immunity. If they win, the prize money will fuel further development, and validate a whole new VC model in biotech.
In this interview, Fernando Aires, R42 collaborator and LP, unpacks how this approach came together, the science behind it, and how R42 combines interventions as our best shot at outliving aging itself.
Zofia Krajewska: Tell me about yourself and what you are building?
Fernando Aires: I’m an investor. I began with real estate, Bitcoin, and other financial instruments. But my focus, as you can see on my Zoom background screen, is on a venture capital fund out of Palo Alto, California: the R42 fund. It was founded by Ronjon Nag, an Adjunct Professor of Genetics at Stanford, and we invest mainly in companies that are at the intersection of AI and longevity.
The focus of our fund is AI and longevity. On one hand, we function as a regular VC fund, with a global portfolio. But we are also entering the XPrize competition about longevity, which is pretty exciting. We have a team of 10 portfolio companies that are jointly competing in that.
Why did you join R42?
I met Prof. Ronjon Nag, R42’s founder, at a conference in London. We started talking and a friendship developed. I have a computer and chip design background, while Ronjon has an AI background, and we both do all kinds of things to increase longevity. So the natural passion that I had towards that and for investing in technology drew me to this fund. And, soon enough, I'm doing presentations with them, talking to their potential investments. So that’s how I spend quite a bit of my time currently.
You're assembling your portfolio companies into a collective longevity play for your X-Prize entry. Why go for a multi-intervention strategy by combining forces, instead of betting big on a single, maybe more developed moonshot solution?
That's a really good question, and the answer is very simple: the competition is only seven years long.
Proba
bly the most famous longevity person in the world, David Sinclair from Harvard, has been working on a single molecule using AI that can turn on certain genes and change our epigenetics. And he thinks they can reverse aging within a certain amount of time. But, we know that from an approval perspective, especially in the US with FDA, it might take at least 10 years before that's actually in place. So even if we found that magic molecule, which he might find any day, it will take a decade to reach the market.
Currently, there are over 1500 companies worth over $200 billion working on AI longevity solutions. We believe that if we have about 10 companies that do different things, and you additionally add diet, exercise, and a good social circle, then we can extend your life by 10 to 20 years. So that's our approach. Our method is “let's try everything, and if you do a little bit of everything right now, your chances of succeeding are higher”.
What companies or technologies would your cumulative solution include?
I'll just go down the list, there's about 10 of them.
We have a company dealing with mitochondria, your power generators inside ourselves. And as we age, we lose a lot of mitochondria. A lot of the mitochondria dysfunction problems that people turn into known diseases. So, this company, called Mitrix, takes blood from the patient and puts it into a bioreactor, grows mitochondria in the bioreactor and puts it back into the person. This gives you significantly more energy. It's like if you're going to upgrade your laptop, the first thing that you would do is replace the battery, so you get better performance.
Another company, Swaza, created a respiratory therapy which can be used by soldiers. It's essentially a breathing aid that oxygenates your body and removes CO2 at the same time, which allows for muscle building. This is important for the XPrize since one of its criteria is reversing muscle loss with age.
We also have a genetics company doing CRISPR–they use machine learning to determine, very precisely, where they do cuts, and anti-CRISPR, to prevent them from doing cuts in the wrong place. With that technology, it will be able to tackle genes that are responsible for three areas: muscle, BDNF (Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor), and T-Cell, for immunity.
Another very exciting company that’s part of the team is called Rubido Life Sciences–they’ll essentially make you young and beautiful. Their technology kills senescent cells, known as zombie cells. As we age, you can easily see skin wrinkling and drying up. That's because a lot of the cells in that skin are zombie cells. They stop dividing, but they're still taking up resources. They create inflammation and, eventually, fibrosis. If you have enough zombie cells in any organ, it’s likely that it's getting very old and it's not going to last too long. So, they're tackling that in various forms.
Out of the supplements space, we have two companies: one of them is called Keto Swiss, out of Switzerland, led by Elena Gross. Their supplements can get you into a ketogenic state, like in a ketogenic diet state, without fasting. Our brain loves to use ketones as fuel–we get more energetic, we live longer, and reduce inflammation.
Our other supplement company is called Mimio Health, with CEO Chris Rhodes. He looked into what molecules our body produces when we're fasting, and put that into a pill so he can get the benefits of fasting without fasting. He doesn't have ketones in his pills, but he has spermidine, which aids with autophagy, or the detox process that the body goes through to eliminate cells that are broken, which happens during fasting. He can get you into that accelerated autophagy state without fasting.
Another company, Agemica, is essentially a vaccine for aging. Their concept uses the longevity Escape Velocity idea. Do you know that term?
No, what is that?
It's a concept in longevity circles where you can take a therapeutic that will extend your life by one year, and if you do that for every year that you get old, essentially, you can just keep extending your life indefinitely. Ray Kurzweil, a brilliant scientist and engineer, mentions that we will reach this longevity escape velocity in seven years. It's kind of crazy, and people don't realize that it's coming.
Anyways, as I was saying, this company uses AI to find out which drugs work better to tackle diseases of aging like cancer. They're simply going after cancer, every kind of cancer. They have a massive library of molecules and they plug in proteins, in DNA information, and they ask AI to do all kinds of combinations to see what will work out best. They’ll narrow it down to 10 good drugs, and then will implement those with a shot. And the person, again, will live for a year longer. And then, if you take that shot every year, you reach longevity escape velocity. Regardless of the XPRIZE, they will be able to be an independent company no matter what happens. It's not something that they are concerned with.
There is another similar company, which also uses AI, called NeuroAge. It tackles dementia and Alzheimer's with a similar approach: they use AI to select which drugs work better, and within maybe a couple of years, they'll be able to do clinical studies and see the results.
Finally, we have two companies that help us wrap up the solution. One of them is X10e, our clinical partners. They put patches on the body, and they measure all kinds of things–similar to the continuous glucose monitoring patch, but they check many other biomarkers. We’ll gather data through their technology from participants in the clinical trials that we'll be doing, and they will help us analyse what that information means.
We wrap up all these different solutions and protocols with a biomedical AI company called SuperBio.ai. With its support, we’ll see which therapeutics, of the different ones that we have, need different dosages, which interactions are occurring between different therapeutics, and we'll be able to monitor the trial participants.
What would success look like for you in terms of R42 and longevity?
I think there's two answers to that. The first one is the practical answer. The winner of this competition will win $101 million, which is a lot of money that will be distributed amongst the companies and will obviously expedite the longevity area. There is a lot of collaboration between companies in this space and, at the end of the day, having this sort of competition will progress the entire field.
Secondly, if we're able to extend human health span by 10 to 20 years, we’ve made it. I think it's a stepping stone towards a full-fledged solution where we reverse aging.
Do you have any advice for investors or founders in the longevity space?
Obviously, I am part of a fund, and we do our due diligence in trying to figure out which technologies are going to be best. But the obvious answer is, if the company you're investing in is not using AI, it's a loser there. AI is just making things go tremendously faster.
Secondly, there is a lot of noise and so many things happening, which can be overwhelming. My advice is don't get discouraged by the amount of information that is there, and try to focus on a company or two where you might be familiar with what they do. You need to kind of have a hunch.
Overall, epigenetics seem to be the main answer. Our DNA is really immutable. There are, of course, mutations that cause disease, but there's a way to tap into that pristine DNA, and just by modifying the epigenetics in combination with enzymes and proteins, obviously, that will do that job properly. That's probably where the future is. So I think that investing money in companies that do that is probably a smart thing to do.
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