Hustle Awards 2025 Special: LongeVC, Winner of Game-Changing Investor

0:00Welcome back to the Serial Entrepreneur. I'm your host Anna Wood. On today's episode, I'm joined by Sergei Yakimov, founding and managing partner of Longevity. We discuss the journey from serial founder to investor, the longevity space and the innovations that will change lives and prolong health spans, and winning the Game Changing Investor Award at the Hustle Awards 2025. Let's dig in. Hey, how are you? I'm doing well. Thank you for having me. Yes, thank you for coming on. So we begin every episode of the podcast with our signature icebreaker question, which is what's your favorite breakfast cereal and why?

0:42The icebreaker answer to that is I don't have any. I do not eat cereal for breakfast. For the matter of fact, I do not eat breakfast at all. So that's an honest answer. Yeah. Do you know what? I think that's our most common answer now. They either don't eat cereal or don't eat breakfast. The only occasion when I do eat, I don't eat cereal at all, I eat oats. And that happens only when I have a long training session ahead of me in the morning. So if I'm running 20 plus K, this is where it's oats. Otherwise, nothing till 12 a.m. p.m. or midday. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. So would you be able to introduce yourself and tell me about your background?

1:35Sure thing. So my name is Sergei. I am a managing partner and the founding partner of Longevity 1, Longevity 2, as well as a bunch of other kind of infrastructural places we have built throughout the years in the longevity field, such as, for example, the Longevity Science Foundation, which is our nonprofit that distributes non-device grants to scientists and the working on fundamental tech and aging and aging biology which is not yet fit for vc i am so so by by educational background i am quantitative methods person so statistics originally by professional background i started the founder's journey really early so i started at the age of 22 with the first company in engineering i wanted to end up in life sciences originally and so the first one was in engineering the second company age 24 25 was in medical devices and drug-aluting coatings to be precise then i decided well it's about time to go deeper into pharma and therapeutics because therapeutics ending up with therapeutics was ultimately the goal and that was my definition of what life sciences were for me so spent another few years working together with other founders to help them fundraise, help them kind of figure out their fundraising strategy, regulatory strategy, IP protection strategy.

2:58And I did so in the field of age-related diseases. So that was pretty successful. Then I met Gary, my partner in the first fund and the second fund now. We've built another company together. And that company was one of the first ones in the market with a way of extracting anonymized metadata from hospitals, any other patient custodian institutions. So we managed to basically get the data about the patients out of the hospital without compromising any kind of data safety regulations. And that turned out to be extremely useful for speeding up patient recruitment for clinical trials. So we ended up with most of the big pharma using that solution.

3:38We then, you know, kind of took a deeper dive and created our own real world data collection framework, electronic consent management framework. So everything kind of around recruiting patients and making them participate in biomedical research. So that company ended up, it's not sold yet, so it's not exited. That company ended up building a couple of very exciting governmental projects, starting from here in Latvia, actually, where I'm now. Ending up with, for example, designing what is called EGP, Emirati Genome Program, which is the National Genome Program of the UAE. So that was that. And then in 2021, me, Gary, and our third partner, we came together and kind of started to think how to really make sense of our sporadic investment activities to date.

4:27Gary was investing heavily himself as a business angel. I mean, I was a founder. Elia was starting to invest as well. And we did accumulate quite a bit of connections in the world of biotech and in terms of early access to tech in biotech. So we had firsthand relationships with all the major academic institutions. But then we also grew up together with the longevity field because longevity field was kind of emerging out of biotech in its own right, starting in 2016, 2017. So we grew up with all the KOLs in this space as well. And we ended up with a concept of a fund, a very pragmatic fund, really.

5:04They're pragmatically looking at what longevity is and how longevity can be an investable kind of product. This is how in 2021, Longevity One was started. and was started really around our access to tech, and as well our ability to put together, I think, the best scientific advisory board out there consisting of those KOLs that emerged pretty much together with us from that space. So, yeah, that's the, I think, the short version of the story. Yeah, great. My next one was going to be what is longevity, but I think you've covered that. But I think what is your main mission at the fund? I think it's a bit, look, whenever the funds start to talk about the missions and whatever, I kind of stop listening, to be completely honest.

5:55Because a venture capital fund is a vehicle that is supposed to multiply capital. And then the real question is, what do you want to achieve along the way of capital multiplication? multiplication because a VC is an exercise of earning more money to your LPs. Right. If that is sprinkled with a vision and a mission, that's great. But, but whenever a manager says that, you know, it's all about the mission and, and, you know, I don't care about anything else. That's, that's not true. I mean, you go and start a nonprofit if, if that's your, if that's your gig and then it's totally fine, but it's not VC.

6:35So, so longevity was basically created. for us to make a point about how a longevity market and longevity tech can be with a pragmatic outlook and kind of a pragmatic take of what longevity is, can be an investable product and can be a turf to create success stories to where even more unspecialized capital in. So our thesis, which back in the days was very unpopular, because most of the capital that was deployed in longevity was deployed in holistic fighting aging type of tech so so people you know were basically investing in holistic theses saying well let's cure aging right you almost have these two camps where one camp says let's cure aging and then age-related diseases never happens well cancer never happens if you're aging which is you know it's it's a weak it's it's a fairly weak cause effect but yeah i mean cancer risk increases with aging you cannot really but battle that and then the second camp which was very unpopular said well let's solve age-related diseases one by one and then by doing so this is how you understand aging and we belong very specifically in this second camp so we really created longevity around our own understanding of what what longevity field is and that is the field where multiple areas and kind of multiple tech areas are actually working together and we're talking less traditional biotech such as regenerative medicine more traditional biotech engineering ai you name it so all merged together in order to achieve one very specific endpoint and that is health span prolongation so prolonging healthy human performance so more quality years really not physically just prolonging lifespan That's not important, but prolonging healthy years.

8:27And in our investment thesis, we did exactly this. The first fund has deployed capital over therapeutics. And this is where we look at approaches that have a potential for disease modifying solution. And by disease modifying, I mean actually solving the disease in specific disease domains. And this is where we've looked specifically at the ability of our space, longevity space, to finally combine the findings that we had in the aging research and aging biology with more traditional biotech approaches in terms of the disease focus etc because you cannot avoid those the regulators still demand it right so you need to adapt to the realities of this world we've also deployed in diagnostics selectively and this is where we think a huge impact can be made if you deploy in areas where there is a very acute unmet need and this is where for example we were behind very early investors behind the only working technology as of now to diagnose ovarian cancer based on blood and stage one before that it was it was impossible as well as we've spent quite a bit of time with the infrastructural solutions and infrastructural meaning ai for drug discovery de novo protein sequencing so novel sequencing methods everything that helps us to design drugs faster right so a very pragmatic outlook really which played out pretty well for us so coming back to your question of what's the mission look the mission is of course ending up with better patient outcomes right and i am i am a rare disease patient myself so i i know exactly you know what rare disease patients feel especially in the areas which are not which are considered to be an unmet need in pharma, right, where you don't have a treatment at all, or you have a treatment which is not effective.

10:20So the standard is very poor. But it would be, I guess, unfair to say that, you know, a venture capital fund is only about patient impact. It is. But you achieve it if you do your work as an investor well. And if you do your work as an investor well, you also achieve your kind of capital multiplier. And that allows you to put together the second fund, the third fund, etc. and move on with your mission and your impact and whatever that is. That's, I think, the key. Yeah, definitely. So you mentioned some of the areas that you've already invested in. Are there other areas of biotech that you're interested in investing in in the future?

10:59Well, biotech is a bit of an umbrella term in the same way as longevity is an umbrella term, right? So we're very focused on applying aging biology to age-related diseases. that's that's our key takeaway as well as we're very focused on deploying capital in in our second fund which is being raised right now for example it's going to be therapeutics plus infrastructure so these will be two key areas so we either solve age-related diseases and we understand because the longevity field has evolved it has evolved from just talking generally about the rule of senescent cells and you know telomeres and whatever into evolving in specific therapies that have an endpoint that can be measurable in a clinical trial setting so suddenly we now have a bunch of longevity tech that is focused enough to sustain a meaningful conversation with a regulator with fda with ema whatever and be allowed into human clinical trials and and we have such companies in fund one portfolio already which is very encouraging so it's the the focus is still the same it's it's the laser focus that we have the whole team so we have a huge team the deal team is seven people right and and longevity which is quite big for a venture capital fund of any size and plus the scientific advisory board which is another 14 people so everything is built to achieve kind of this scientific excellence in due diligence and a very pragmatic take of how we evaluate these companies yeah great so how do you think that your previous experience being a founder kind of within the space has impacted how you invest uh well i mean it's a it's a mixed bag of experiences right so as a founder you you kind of understand what sort of struggles the companies are going through especially in the early stages when you have a lot to prove when you have a lot of variables that are unclear on the table especially the regulatory you know the first clinical pre-clinical readouts etc but it it does help in terms of weeding out wishful thinking so you see wishful thinking from from a mile away because you did it yourself right and uh and you understand how how founders sometimes tend to not because they're they're bad personalities or or whatever but when you spend a lot of time with something you sometimes lose the ability to evaluate it critically i guess and and and whenever you let's say you have you know clinical data that you need to evaluate or or any other variables that have certain degree of freedom when it comes to their interpretation this is where wishful thinking kicks in and sometimes founders want to see something that is not really there but it's not their problem it's your problem as an investor to spot it and then you know provide a an unbiased view of what what's really happening or what you think is really happening so that's one but then all the normal struggles with fundraisings and with with whatever yeah that that's pretty much it and then and then you have another decent pieces of experience i mean as as a patient and as a founder in the space i do understand patient journey pretty well uh and uh whenever you're looking at solutions that are patient facing or physician facing which is where we don't really invest in those we only invest in you know hardcore therapeutics but but what once in a while it it still kind of ends up on the desk you'll very often realize that founders have not done their homework in terms of really understanding how patients behave and how physicians behave for example and and sometimes these solutions great on paper actually create more friction in the patient journey or or the the healthcare practitioner journey so things like that like it's it's it's almost it's almost like coming to a you know a car repair station and and having some background in terms of how to mend cars right although you're not doing it yourself anymore but but you kind of understand what is a mechanic doing with your car anyway so there is a bit less room to to end up disappointed and i call it call it call it that way yeah so are there any qualities that you look for or that you've identified that make a startup investable in the early stages?

15:33I don't think there is a recipe. I mean, a lot of funds standardize it all the way to standardizing the valuation, etc. I don't think it's applicable in biotech. Everyone is different. Even several companies being nominally kind of on the same level of development, they would have very different data, very different sometimes mode of IP ownership ship everything so so it's always ad hoc kind of case by case evaluation but but really what you're looking for is you're looking for a blend between the entrepreneurial and technical components in the team so investing in science only teams is a is a is a bad sport you need someone to be able to talk with the industry early to communicate the demands of the industry because in the very same way as in software you have this problem of if you don't get out of the building straight away and start talking to the market and to the users you're risking you know building something that people actually don't need right so it's or it's over complicated so in biotech you have the same thing sometimes you know scientific teams are very excited about a modality or or disease indication or anything or you know pre-clinical data that they have and the industry doesn't need it right because it just it just doesn't and and you are bound to be doing something that the industry needs right now because these are your strategic partnerships as you go you cannot survive you know in a complete vacuum so that's one ip ownership for sure this is something that you see very vastly different across different geographies so us has pretty much nailed ip transfer from let's say big university into a company a spin out europe is still catching up there are bizarre actually i mean you're in uk so uk is guilty of several absolutely bizarre IP transfer practices and university equity ownership practices in these companies that are spinouts that I've seen in in my life I mean so I've seen tech literally seen tech coming out of European institutions that is potentially very promising like it's great the science team is great but but it's not investable the cap table from the get-go is not investable at all because the university has 40 of that equity in it and and and that's that's about it so so so you are spending time on that for sure and i think this is the most pragmatic component you're going to see they're acceptable or not acceptable for you yeah that that being said the absence of wishful thinking and you know degrees of freedom and data interpretation you kind of just look at how now the team positions this product and whether they don't really try to over inflate what is actually there it's good to be excited about the science you're doing it's it's it's not good to be overly excited about things that are not not there right yeah that's i think these are these are kind of your main oh and in longevity you have this i actually have this on the slide in one of my talks usually whenever i talk about investing in longevity and That is prolonging rodent lives doesn't make it a company, right?

18:53So if you made mice live longer in a lab, that's great. That's great for mice, right? I mean, all credit to you. It doesn't make it a company. We are super good in treating stuff and dogs and combating Alzheimer's and smaller animals and whatever. it doesn't as long as it doesn't translate into humans it doesn't as long as it doesn't have a clinical program behind it meaningful conversations with the industry you know and the other like 15 components that's a science project and and that's by far one of the biggest misconceptions that we see kind of company to company so look i didn't give you any any any super enlightening i guess tips here but it's it's really it's really very pragmatic i would like to say that we're looking at the track record of the founders yes and no actually sometimes you have you know young phds spinning out their phd research out of the lab at harvard and they don't have track record of exits before it doesn't make their science worse because of that i mean you got to start somewhere so you're kind of actually pretty open-minded about this maybe versus things like fintech and you know more traditional software approaches yeah i think it's always quite interesting talking with investors and seeing kind of what qualities they say because some people do say some solid qualities and a founder but other people i think kind of like you that you're looking at the entire picture of the founder the company and everything around that.

20:29Yeah, because it can fail in a million ways. In an absolute million ways. And we've I can't say we've paid for it with our own money back in the days investing privately. You get these lessons by making mistakes really. You can listen to whatever amount of podcasts people saying not do this and not do that. But then until you actually do it yourself and you feel it, then the lesson is not warranted. Yeah, you've got to learn it by feeling that pain. So I think it's a good segue onto my next question, which is longevity had zero write-offs in its first fund. What do you think led to this success?

21:10Due diligence. Due diligence. Access to deals. So access to meaningful deals, which is we don't invest from the market. we get allocations because of you know our track record in the industry and our scientific advisory board and kind of ability to build these relationships with other funds with the scientific with the research institutions with smaller kind of research aging research groups so we have access to i think already at at the at the intake pipeline intake point we have access to quality tech right that being said by the way i mean the first fund has looked at 2700 companies 2 ,700 and has invested in 20 so that gives you a rough estimation of the conversion rate right but so it's it's good quality of science at the at the intake originally and then it's it's just science dd we've invested every single cent the the first fund had in management fees plus our own money into building the team that is capable of evaluating science right and and and evaluating these or estimating rather the the viability of of translatability of that science from animal to human because if you're doing early stage investing in biotech in general you're looking at a bunch of animal data right and then the biggest question that you have universally it can be a longevity company a rejuvenation company whatever that is if it worked in non-human primates will it work in humans right and if it worked in human non-human primates is actually the easiest one but if it if it worked in mice will it translate in humans like in a much much much more complicated organism right that's it and there is no secret sauce i just you know that being said there were deals that i think we missed that that we should have invested in but we we passed because there were things that we were absolutely unconvinced in in terms of hypotheses scientific hypothesis and you have a bunch of those early stage anyway right so it's just a game of you believe in this or you don't believe in this right and and what sort of proof that you have to believe in this.

23:30So I think we've missed a couple good companies, really good companies that we didn't invest in because of this vigorous process. But, you know, they want the game. Yeah, true. So you also won Game Changing Investor at the Hustle Awards this year. So congratulations on that. How did that make you feel and what does that mean for longevity? the city uh look so so i think well thank you first and foremost but uh we've uh i think it's it's it's maybe i would kind of approach it as a statement to us doing something right and and uh i think we're happy that our thesis resonates and kind of the field that we're playing in is is new but it's very impactful for sure and we're happy that we can perform in that emerging field because emerging fields are very much like, you know, kind of undiscovered waters.

24:27Very often in terms of investment, you kind of don't know what works, what doesn't work. So there are no preset patterns really by others. You are the one setting patterns. So we're just happy for the acknowledgement really and, you know, that our work has been spotted in this way. At the end of the day, look, we firmly, we actually think that way, right? So we firmly believe that longevity is The industry was defiest of the value. Right. So the point is, whatever, and biotech in general, but longevity specifically now, because it is emerging as the dominant kind of force on biotech, because biotech is switching from maintaining diseases to actually solving diseases.

25:09And this is where we play. but realistically whenever you let's say you become a patient or you see a patient with an atroated disease chances are that extremely high chances like 90 plus percent chances are that the treatment and the protocol that this patient is receiving be it cancer be it multiple sclerosis be it anything else was once funded by a VC right because pharma doesn't invent things in house pharma is responsible for you know on average 10 percent of tech invented in-house or developed in-house everything else is acquired from from small biotechs and the fuel for small biotechs is venture capital so people that assume the most risk for the most reward for sure but the most risk at the very early stage so you know we're obviously happy that that someone someone noticed the things that we're doing.

26:09I mean, we became pretty, I think, pretty well-established in our own space already. And we're happy that we're going beyond. Great, and congratulations. And kind of moving more into the story of longevity, what do you think have been some of the biggest challenges so far? Well, I mean, look, it was the first time fund of ours on joseph one raising a first-time fund is hard and it took us 30 percent of our own money actually to be put in right to to get the rest 70 so that's that's one fundraising huge challenge the moving to the industry which was living in a slightly different paradigm that our approach is still legitimately longevity focused but much more pragmatic and much more workable when it comes to looking at the field as an investment opportunity rather than exciting biology type of opportunity right so we had our own kind of curve when we proved that our thesis focusing on diseases rather than just general rejuvenation or general fighting aging will be beneficial so that's another challenge putting together a capable team that has a good chemistry right huge challenge takes a lot of effort and luck actually i think look everything like if you if you think about it not none of this stuff is is just given you spend time on all of it starting from your your your fundraising activity you know ending up with the portfolio companies you ended up with because if you go deep down the rabbit hole it's still a game of probability not luck but probability to be able to be in the same room with these founders that you've invested in eventually and having looked at this company that you've invested in eventually etc.

28:17So none of this is really playbook I'd honestly call it that way. And then of course the challenge is is i think it's getting easier and easier to do it back in the days it was harder it's drawing a line between where longevity ends and traditional biotech begins and people the challenge really is not really drawing the line but but but not drawing the lines that's the challenge because we we actually do not like this conversation whenever you know people say well this is traditional biotech and this is longevity well it's not true i longevity is is basically just a more complete version of biotech when we're talking about really same issues just a slightly different biological maybe a slightly more courageous biological approach to these issues and a slightly more ambitious end goal right rather than just maintaining these diseases and just calling it today and the commercial success you try to go beyond right so it's almost like having a purpose in life versus just you know hanging around so yeah i think these are your major challenges i guess like on the flip side of that what do you think have been some of the highlights so far exactly being able to do these things that i've just listed as challenges that's the flip so these are the highlights right being able to communicate the vision being able to prove that this this makes sense financially being able to eventually you know split meaningfully split biotech and longevity or rather prove that they should not be split they should be looked at kind of two different families of approaches really but but we're still doing the same thing we're still doing the same goal and the industry doesn't really need to be arrogant saying well you know cancer patients are are already patients so we don't care about them this is for biotech to deal with and then we're only dealing with healthy people that want to live to 150 right so that's that's garbage so like you know the inclusiveness i think the inclusiveness of the of the thesis is key and and and i i believe look i don't want to credit us for for doing that solo right but i believe with our contribution to this the industry is kind of getting a more wholesome appearance in that regard.

30:41Yeah. I think kind of like with the challenges that you stated earlier, what do you think have been the lessons that you've learned from those challenges? Well, it's hard to say. It's an iterative process. The biggest lesson is whenever you're proving a point, you should be prepared for a very bumpy ride in the very beginning because you will have a lot of pushback, at least ideological but also you know on the fundraising front for example when you've proven your point everyone will take it as granted right so so the biggest lesson is you really if you want to if you want to prove your thesis you're not doing it for for the sake of you know glory from the industry or anything like that you're just doing it for the sake of proving the thesis and and if that thesis will get picked up by others afterwards even if the others will pretend that you know that's the way it should be right and then you know they always thought like that as well you should be shouldn't be really upset about it you should consider it to to be actually job ideally done that's it great so what does the future hold for longevity do you have any big plans coming up that you can discuss yes second fund i mean we're now in the fundraising process for the second fund is going to be a larger vehicle.

32:01I think the first closing announcement will come out pretty soon. And same focus, there's more dry powder for us to execute on the vision. I think that's the biggest plan so far. We also do have quite a bit of active work going on in our sister fund, which is called NIVC. It's also a US-based vehicle. It is dealing with animal health and animal longevity specifically, which is surprisingly underfunded as a market interestingly enough although very capable of paying because people you know pay for their pets sometimes much much more actively than they pay for themselves when it comes to treatments and kind of wellness and well-being so you know we're just expanding again iteratively expanding on our ecosystem on we're scaling our efforts nothing extraordinary just building on top of what we what we what we already built as a foundation yeah great well that comes to my final question which is did you have anything else to add or plug at the end of the podcast uh no i think i'm okay again thank you very much for recognizing us and the more i think my my biggest message here is the more joint success stories we create as a field, the more actors come in, the more stakeholders come in, the more awareness we raise.

33:25And for those who will be listening, I just really want to emphasize again that without the longevity field, without solving the issues we're solving, which is give or take premature death, right? Nothing else will make sense. None of your crypto will make sense. None of your fintech will make sense. SaaS, enterprise SaaS. name any, right? It will not make sense if you don't solve this fundamental issue that everyone has. And in a very interesting way, you know, the issue of longevity and premature dying and kind of, you know, these health risks equalizes everyone without looking at their social status or, you know, the tax bracket, if you wish.

34:13It's just universal for everyone. So the more people we have, the more awareness we have as a field, I'm not saying investing, but really just being interested in it, it did the better. Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today, Sergei. And once again, congratulations on winning Game Changing Investor at the Hustle Awards. Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Bye. If you like this episode, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and check out Startup Magazine's socials to stay up to date on the latest startups news.