Loyal’s Celine Halioua: From Defying Doubters To Pioneering Dog Longevity

0:00I would say loyal is almost entirely composed of Upstart moments. People literally laughed in my face when I would say what I was working on for a long time. Why? Because it wasn't the$100 billion thing they're used to? Well, it's just like, I always say like nobody has an investment memo for dog longevity. Welcome to the Upstarts podcast, our weekly show where we talk to emerging startup founders about their upstart moment. It's our belief that upstarts are challengers who are pushing the status quo to achieve high impact, punch above their weight, and improve the world. I'm Alex Conrad, founder and editor of Upstarts Media.

0:38I'm joined today by Celine Halioua, founder and CEO of Loyal. Loyal is to us a real upstart company. They are trying to improve longevity for dogs, a long, arduous, and sometimes underappreciated category. She's making up the category as she goes. This podcast is brought to you by Mercury, radically different banking that's already loved by 300 ,000 entrepreneurs. Thanks for coming, Celine. Excited to be here. Loyal stood out to us at Upstarts because Celine's been working on this since 2019, right? And she's doing something crazy that I think really embodies an Upstart spirit. You are trying to extend the longevity of dogs, right?

1:16Yep. By two years is what I think? Hopefully even more. Hopefully even more. That is amazing. And this is also a business where you don't get results right away. There isn't a lot of revenue for this company. And it's been a few years for you to build this. So tell me a little bit about what inspired you to be working on this. And we can talk a bit about what this means for dogs, for the humans watching, and also for company builders who might be curious about how you built Loyal today. Yeah. I started Loyal when I was about 24 years old. I never thought I'd be a founder or CEO. I didn't even know about entrepreneurship until I was like 22, honestly.

1:52It was kind of a random walk that led me here with interest in a couple of things. One, I've always been a huge animal person. and I've been a cherry my entire life. I grew up with like 15 cats and four dogs and like hamsters and rescued squirrels. And like my friends in SF say I have a farm, basically. And to be clear, I live in the city. You have multiple rescue cats right now. I do, I do. I'm currently a crazy cat lady and I'm sure I'll become a crazy dog lady again soon. So I was really always loved animals, but I, professionally, I was working on bio and the idea of trying to develop medicines for some of the worst diseases that humans deal with, of which, you know, age-related diseases, ones like cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, Parkinson's, are both very terrible and also very intractable with current medicine.

2:41And so I got really passionate about the idea of can we develop drugs that target the way we age over time? So basically, instead of trying to target, you know, you're healthy, healthy, healthy, and then one day you get diagnosed with the cancer, and then we'd like throw all these like things that you to try to like help you have some more healthy years. Can we develop a drug that targets the inevitable decline that we all have? But for humans, right? For humans. You were not Dr. Doolittle yet. No, I was not Dr. Doolittle. I was all in this as in humans. And happy to go into how like how I somehow became a dog longevity lady.

3:12Well, yeah, I mean, go take us from scientists carrying about human longevity to what you've told me is not pet tech, but is biotech focused on dogs, right? Yeah, consumer animal pharma is how I like to call it. It's a new category. You can really call it whatever you want. That's right. I just like being special. So basically, I did an undergrad in neuroscience. And it was while I was studying neuroscience that I learned about the kind of terror of neurodegenerative disorders. So think of, you know, diseases like dementia, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, these things where you lose yourself, right?

3:44Because you lose your brain and you lose your brain function. And specifically, I got very interested in research that was showing that, you know, while we think of this as a disease of the elderly, often people are developing the first signs of it subclinically, but like mechanistically when they're our age, which is horrifying. Very, very. I don't like that at all. Yeah, sorry to like scare you. It's starting to develop now. So by the time we become symptomatic, the symptom is actually not the disease. It's the downstream consequence of all the damage the disease has done and accumulated over decades.

4:17Okay. And so it's one of the reasons why it's, you know, it's infamously difficult to develop a drug for Parkinson's, for example. Like they try to do things that delay it or slow it, but there's nothing, there's not a pill I can give you that makes like antibiotics that make you get better from it, right? It's all about managing symptoms and trying to like give the person as much healthy time, but it's always in a worse quality of life. And so I just thought this was like super unacceptable, right? I, you know, when you're a kid, you're like, oh, like adults can always fix everything. and the realization that like that wasn't the case and we kind of all have these ticking time bombs and inside of us and that one day you could just get this diagnosis and that's it right I kind of had like an existential breakdown honestly I was just like I can't live in that world knowing that and so then it became like how can I work on this problem and I was like okay I'm gonna be a nurse and I was gonna be a doctor then I was gonna be a researcher and it's kind of through this random walk that I got interested in this aging thesis and this idea of well, why don't we develop drugs against the decline that precipitates, you know, the formalization of a disease diagnosis.

5:20And so obviously, I wanted to do that in humans. I started a PhD at Oxford. And having to go into more details, but long story short, I kind of realized that there's a lot of reasons you can develop a drug for aging and lifespan extension in humans today. But it's actually not biological, it's just time. That is so interesting. And And Celine, now as a dog owner, selfishly, I want to know, how do you go from that to making drugs to improve dog lifespan? Because I think that's an upstart shift right there. It's a huge shift. I mean, basically, the realization was that if I wanted to develop and target this problem in humans straight on, like linearly, I would have to raise a billion dollars.

6:00Easy. It would take decades. Which, if you're an AI company now, is maybe not so hard. Yeah, now it's sexy. Especially in 2019 for bio is hard. And like a totally unproven person, right? I was like an associate at a venture fund when I was having this idea. And I was a PhD student before, right? Like loyal is basically my first job. Unless you count gelato scooping. I was a great gelato scooper. And VC clearly not what you'd call a real job then. I mean, it was just like me and the GP. Fair enough. So it wasn't even like, I wasn't even at an institution. And so yeah, I realized you can't do it in humans, but you can do it in dogs.

6:33And oh, by the way, this is like the canonical problem. of having a dog and loving a dog is that they live a shorter life than you, right? You go through these life milestones together, but they're only able to be there for a period of time that's much, much shorter. And you kind of are signing up for this inevitable decline and loss. And it's just like, it's so painful to lose a dog. I mean, if you've had a dog and you've lost a dog, you know, the pain of losing a dog. I know you've gone out of your way since to sort of adopt and help older pets. Were you already doing this? Was this something that was already personal?

7:09Or was that something that kind of came along the way? We've always had like the misfits, I would say. I've never bought an animal in my life. I guess I bought my goldfish, but it was almost like the rescues. Thank you. I appreciate it. It's always been like the animals that needed a home for whatever reason. And I started adopting senior dogs a few years ago because most people don't want senior dogs. And it's honestly like symbiotic. Like they just want a couch to sleep on. And I'm a busy founder who can't go and like run a Malinois three times a day. And so they get a nice home. I can afford the care that they need, which is often expensive.

7:46I get like the inevitable, like deep love that you get from a senior dog. Part of why I ask is because I feel like, you know, that fear of loss of your pet is hard and scary for people. Maybe deters them from taking a chance on those pets. and it seems like it's a big part of loyal, right? That you can maybe have a couple extra years with your pet before they're aged and maybe declined in their sort of full abilities. Is that on the right track? Definitely. I mean, one of the things, and this is all like pending FDA sign off them, et cetera, is like, I'd actually really love the idea of like, if you go and adopt a senior dog from a shelter, you get a coupon for a year's worth of loyal or something, right?

8:25That'd be cool. Because that is exactly why they don't adopt senior dogs. And I mean, I'm considering adopting a dog. My previous senior dog passed away a few months ago. And even me, like literally being like the senior dog longevity lady, I'm hesitating adopting another senior dog because it was so unbelievably brutal. How much was it personal drive versus seeing that this might be the easier market or like the more achievable market opportunity to get to that maybe more expensive human goal down the road? It was both. I never thought I'd work on dog drugs. I wanted to be a vet when I was a kid.

9:00But besides that, I really never thought I'd be in this space. But no, I mean, honestly, it actually just started as a crazy idea. So I've been working at Longevity Fund. We were working on this problem of how do we get the first drug FDA approved for lifespan extension and been like banging our heads against the wall. This was a fund that was looking at a bunch of different ways that we could improve lifespan basically. So it was basically the first venture fund that was investing in therapies to extend human lifespan. And every company that pitched us like had the same narrative. Like, oh, we have this drug.

9:28It extends lifespan in mice, but, you know, FDA is evil. Aging isn't a disease, so we're developing it for this specific, like, osteoarthritis or an eye disease or whatever. And I was like, that's great, but, like, can we also develop longevity drugs for longevity? And so it was kind of like a funny realization that you could do it in dogs and a dog circumvented. But I actually didn't know anything about the market. Like, I didn't grow up bougie, coastal, right? I grew up in, like, the suburbs of Austin before Austin was, like, the hit place. that look at how people go now. I didn't know there was this whole market of people that pay like hundreds of dollars a month for their pet care.

10:04I just thought it was like interesting scientifically. And then actually a VC heard what I was working on and thinking about and was like, holy crap, like Salim, you don't understand. This is the biggest market ever. Did people - He was a doodle owner. Oh, well, there you go. And a VC, obviously. So like VC plus doodle owner, it was like - I'm not sure I would trust a doodle owner on advice. They are a little spicy. I do have a rescue mutt, which makes me kind of militant there. Yeah. Were you already maybe a black sheep or an upstart to care about longevity in Silicon Valley? Or was it when Loyal kind of goes all in on dogs that maybe some people are like, what are you doing?

10:40People literally laughed in my face when I would say what I was working on for a long time. Why? Because it wasn't the$100 billion thing they're used to? Well, it's just like, I always say like nobody has an investment memo for dog longevity. Like I'm the first dog longevity company I've ever talked to. I'm most people's first, either first bio investment or first dog investment or first longevity investment, right? Like there's not a lot to reference when it comes to Loyal. And so, and also just like the phrase dog longevity almost sounds like it should be on a TV show about Silicon Valley. Like it's kind of mimetic.

11:15In a way, but then when I've, like we wrote about Loyal last year. Yeah. And I think readers were passionate in the responses. Oh yeah. They will maybe laugh a little bit, but then they will also be really interested. Because if they don't have a dog, someone else they love has a dog. And they're like, oh, that sounds so silly. Tell me more. It's actually hilarious. There was this one, one of the investors that ended up investing in us. He wasn't personally a dog person at the time. And so he was really skeptical. And then he was like, yeah, so I asked every dog owner I ran into in the last week if they would buy the dog longevity drug.

11:50And all of them were ravenous and asking me to tell me. and they're like, ah, we'd pay thousands of dollars. And I was like, yeah, of course, dude. But it's like very non-obvious, I think, if you haven't had that problem before. I think you at some point, you guys projected it would take five years,$25 million to make a drug cure. Was that right? Depends what you count. I think five-ish is about right, maybe six. I think if you do everything right, you can do it in five to six years and then, you know, extends out if you start making mistakes. 25 mil is probably accurate for conditional approval if you don't include the team.

12:30Okay. Would you have anticipated six, seven years ago that you would need to raise$135 million? I wouldn't have thought I could, honestly. Yeah. So what was it like talking to VCs? Did they think you were a crazy upstart or? Oh, yeah. I mean, there's always, it's always been very binary. they either got it and loved it immediately or they're like this is like I'm not going to take you seriously right I also didn't pattern match very well Silicon Valley tends to look backwards at the previous generation of founders that made their funds a lot of money and then that becomes like the pattern match for the current generation of what's like hot or not so like Palmer Lucky is like one right now and you see all like the good no tech bros all are like the same like fuck you America, right?

13:16That's just because it's a pattern match before that. It was Zuck before that. It was whatever. And I don't fit any of those pattern matches for like a lot of reasons. And you're in a category that some might initially think is a consumer product. But I know when we wrote about Loyal last year, you were clear to me, I don't see this as just a consumer product or pet tech, like the people you identify with are sort of deep tech, really kind of hard science peers. Yeah, it's like, well, we're kind of like a lot of things, right? Like we're a bio company, we're doing as rigorous a science as any biotech company, but we also are a consumer company.

13:49I think we're culturally a deep tech company, right? We're an Adams based company that's built in Silicon Valley, but we're kind of everything and nothing at the same time. And so it just makes it difficult because no matter who you're talking to, even if they understand, you know, variable A, B, and C about the company, they don't understand DEF, right? Because there's, again, there's no dog longevity fund out there. I don't know if there ever will be maybe there will be one day right i mean you could get into cats we could have a fund that does all sorts of animals i love my cats um they don't always convince me that i should expand into cat longevity drugs i know we also talked in our article last year that cats already live pretty long it would be really hard to track in the first place yes and trying to give a cat a pill every day is like my cat is currently getting a daily i will i'll keep far away from my mother's cats in that regard for sure.

14:38Yeah, it's not easy. You're now have a lot positive from a momentum standpoint. You have had a conditional approval, efficacy approval, a couple steps in this journey. Could you talk a little bit about that? And then we can sort of talk about where you feel you are in the journey. Because I know it can be a very different for a founder almost on a daily or hourly basis. I love that question, actually. So we're obviously going through the FDA process, and people don't realize this, but the FDA regulates animal drugs, as strictly as they do human drugs, actually, it's an extremely rigorous process.

15:12So we've been going through that for a long time. And the study of what, 1300 dogs running right now, it's the largest ever clinical trial in dogs or cats, or I think any animal species that's ever been run, at least in the US. And to be able to sell our drug and bring it to market and you know, you be able to have it prescribed to your dog one day, we have to basically get the agency sign off on three major things. One, that it works or it's like conditionally believed to work. The second is that it's safe, which for a drug like this, it's for relatively healthy dogs to keep up healthy longer.

15:44The safety bar is extremely high. And a third, that you can manufacture it reliably at scale. And so again, like manufacturing a pharmaceutical is so unbelievably complicated. A metaphor or comparison I use is car manufacturing, right? Like when Tesla first came online and started manufacturing cars, you know, it was a nightmare. Like the meme is Elon Musk, like sleeping on the floor of the factory. It's kind of the same thing for manufacturing a pharmaceutical. The big difference that you can't let some optimal product roll off the floor into patients. Like you could only launch and start selling once it's literally perfect.

16:18I hope you don't need to sleep in the office. I legally cannot, you know, you have to wear like those bunny suits when you go into the manufacturing facilities. It's all very regulated. So I'm not sleeping on the floor of our manufacturing facility, FDA. Sounds good. But metaphorically speaking. I understand. I am. In my soul. In my soul. And so it's safety, efficacy, manufacturing are the three main things. We earned the efficacy approval last year, which was a huge, huge deal for our senior dog lifespan extension drug. We've also earned it for another drug for large dog lifespan extension. And then we just earned the safety approval a few weeks ago, which was really important.

16:56to all of us. Because safety concerns, correct me if I'm wrong, had been one reason why you kind of moved away from the gene therapy that you had studied in your previous life. Yes. The thesis is that, very quickly, what we realized is that we cannot do harm first and foremost. And two, hopefully we can help. If we have a product that definitely does not do harm or in the highest likelihood does not do harm, and then hopefully extends lifespan, veterinarians and dog owners will buy that. If you have a drug that even, you know, in a very small portion of the population can have drastically negative effects, that risk reward is not worth it because a dog in front of you is currently healthy, right?

17:35It's not like a cancer drug where you know the dog is going to die in 12 months from, you know, whatever cancer they have. So you're willing to give them the chemo, even though the chemo has a bunch of negative side effects with it, right? A drug like this, it needs to be basically as safe as milk. And so we picked drugs that we believed were that way. But to prove it was extremely rigorous. It took a lot of time. It took a lot of data. And so having the agency's independent sign off, you know, the efficacy approval is probably the sexiest approval. But I think the safety was actually the most important one.

18:03So do you feel like you're nearing a finish line or like you can see? Yeah, I can see it. Yeah, I can see the light. What is and what how does that feel as a founder? I you know, it's funny when you become a founder, at least I do not have high highs or low lows anymore i'm kind of like always in like the middle like good so like i think if i sit back and think about it i'm like wow i cannot believe it but it's in some ways i'm like oh yeah like we did the thing we said we were gonna do right the problem for me is a year into upstarts i feel the meh about the wins because i feel like we should be getting them and then i still take any loss really hard yeah so it's more like the hating losing more than the loving winning but But I'm sure six years, seven years in, maybe you just get used to that.

18:52I, yeah, I never was like that big about wins. Like I've never been really that good at celebrating, which is not great when you're a leader. And thankfully, yeah, the lows, I'm just like, well, fuck. Right. And then you move on and you go do the next thing. Yeah. It's like, you know, every so often, like something goes wrong. You're just like, oh, no, like the world is exploding. And you're just like, well, got to move on now. Going into the future. And I found that is more sustainable. When I launched Upstarts Media last year, I had big ambitions and a lot to figure out. I knew I needed a bank that could move at my speed and grow with me too.

19:26With Mercury, I was able to get started in minutes without leaving my desk. Mercury made it easy to send and receive wires and manage the cash flow of our growing business from day one. Now, I can spend less time with busy work and more time with the founders I like to cover. Building a media startup comes with new challenges every day. But with Mercury, banking is one I don't need to worry about. You don't accept outdated tools like floppy disks and fax machines anywhere else in your work and life. Why accept them for something as important as your money? Visit Mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes, like I did.

20:01Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA, members FDIC. So part of the hope of this show is that we talk to people at different stages of their startups. All of them will be probably bigger than upstarts. But still, you know, from sort of public recently to about to have a big breakthrough, showing traction, to sort of think about sort of the impacts of their upstart technology, but also think about their upstart moment and sort of what are the lessons, even as you're sort of still in the process. So I'm curious, do you feel like you've had your upstart moment so far with Loyal?

20:36What would you define as an upstart moment? An upstart moment could be that moment where you felt like the odds were most against you or you would have to really push the status quo. Oh, yeah. Sort of that big challenger moment where you're like, yes, we can do this. It will be disruptive. It will be great. You know, burn the ships. Oh, yeah. I would say Loyal is almost entirely composed of upstart moments. And then like maybe recently. That is partly why I was so excited to have you on the show. I do feel like Loyal is a classic upstart company. Yeah, I mean, when we started, the first thing was just the fact that we thought we could get a drug approved for lifespan extension.

21:13Seems really obvious. Now everyone's like, oh yeah, longevity, like mainstream, all over Twitter. That was not the case. Before Loyal came around, there had never been the FDA acceptance that a drug can be approved for lifespan extension and lifespan extension itself. Point blank period. In fact, it wasn't even considered possible because the FDA regulates drugs for diseases and, you know, lifespan extension is not a disease. And so that was really the biggest risk we took. And honestly, it's a really good example, I think, of being naive and thinking from first principles actually is a superpower sometimes.

21:46If I knew what I know now, I probably wouldn't think I could convince the agency of that. The CEO of NVIDIA said a few months ago, and it kind of went viral, that he thinks that founders need to have some sort of like healthy ignorance or sort of, you know, blinders on to be successful in a way. You do. And it's really difficult when you're building in something that's deeply technical or atoms or physics based because there are things you do need to listen to. Right. And then there's lots of things where you need to ignore and developing the judgment of when should I listen to the status quo?

22:16When should I listen to the expertise? And when should I say, I hear you, I understand, but I'm still going down this way. I think that's something that Loyal has done like generally quite well. And it's one of the reasons we've been successful. You don't want to do the binary burning all the boats versus you also don't want to just like stay on the boat because that's where you end up where everybody else is going. Right. So I think that was our biggest upstart moment. I think deciding what drugs to develop was a really big one, specifically doing multiple drugs at once. What was the reasoning there besides just ambition or reaching more dogs than you could with one drug?

22:48So it was that the, I felt very convicted early on, and I think we ended up being correct about this, that it was inevitable that you can develop a drug to extend dog lifespan. Like that was, there is some pharmaceutical agent out there that is safe and efficacious for extending dog lifespan. That would be like a sufficiently good product. So you have this absurd hypothesis that if you believe it, then that unlocks other... Exactly. So then it's, okay, well, if you then say, okay, but now I'm going to develop LOI1 for dog longevity, you're introducing new risks because you're like, I believe this thing, which is, you know, you believe a ubiquitous truth about the universe, but LOI1 working and being safe for dog longevity is not a ubiquitous truth, right?

23:32If you knew that, it wouldn't be a research program, right? And the problem with bio is that the truth is predetermined. That drug either is safe and efficacious for longevity, or it isn't. And you cannot change the outcome of whatever the universe has predetermined for that, right? It's more about you trying to make a good shot on goal and finding out as quickly as possible if you were correct or not. And so the problem there is, okay, wait, that's kind of crazy to think about. Well, I guess history has been written of whether the drug works or not, and then you just have to spend all this time playing it out, right?

24:08Exactly. That must be kind of weird mentally. Yeah, you cannot, if a drug doesn't work, you cannot make it work. And you cannot make an unsafe drug safe. Now, if you're unethical, maybe you can, right? But obviously, that's never been, you know, how we've operated at Loyal. And that's why the goal of the company has always been to get the first drug FDA approved for lifespan extension. It's never been get Loy 1 approved for lifespan extension and Loy 2. We're actually totally drug agnostic. I obviously have biological hypotheses that I really enjoy personally. But I've always made it super clear to the team from day one, I don't give a shit what our first drug is.