I’m particularly excited to finally be able to talk about Bionaut Labs and their mission to enable precise access of medicine to parts of the brain and body that you simply cannot reach before. We’re proud to be investors alongside Khosla, Compound, BOLD and Revolution.

When I first met Michael and Aviad I was blown away by their dedication to bringing robotics into medicine orders of magnitude cheaper and more accessible. The team had built one of the cheapest and most powerful 3D sensors (SoC + sensor + underlying software) used in Microsoft’s pioneering motion sensing game device Kinect, and exited to Apple (hint all your front facing iPhone sensors). Their next mission was to bring to reality what they loved reading growing up in Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage: miniature technologies that can navigate and cure problems in the brain. They spent the next couple years looking for the most advanced micro and nano-robotics IP in the world, ultimately finding the groundbreaking work from Peer Fischer’s lab at The Max Planck Institute. They spent hundreds of thousands of their own money licensing the technology, bringing on Alex a seasoned medicinal chemist, and set about advancing the technology.

The result was a short video clip highlighting their small microbots being magnetically controlled, precisely tracing the letter R in ex vivo animal eye tissue. To be able to get to that level of precision, using magnetic controls order of magnitude weaker than an MRI machine, on a tiny bot hundreds of microns in size (like a strand of hair), at a rapid speed, is unprecedented. Having done 4 years of neurobiology research at Venkatesh Murthy’s lab at Harvard, with lots of mice brain surgeries and imaging, this really felt like the holy grail of being able to enter and navigate the brain without invasive surgical techniques. At Upfront we strive to back ambitious teams commercializing cutting edge technology that can have wide-ranging impact within years, and here was a team and platform that have the potential to introduce a brand new modality of medicine at the intersection of precision medicine and robotics.

Since leading the Seed round and joining the board 3 years ago, I’ve been fortunate to witness Bionaut grow into a team of interdisciplinary scientists, engineers and software developers, along with regulatory, medical and commercialization experts. From initial small animal safety data that helped attract Khosla Ventures to lead the Series A, to small animal efficacy and large animal safety data, the team has advanced the platform to human scale and reliable and reproducible insertion, navigation, delivery and retraction. These achievements were only possible through the assembly of a multi-faceted team across the sciences, from the founders’ backgrounds in physics, engineering and chemistry, to creative mechanical and electrical engineers, to control algorithm developers and neurobiologists. This isn’t a technology platform you can neatly bucket into tech vs life sciences, software vs hardware, it requires all of the above to create a new modality in medicine.

Bionaut is laser focused on bringing their technology to patients, and the fastest way to do that is leveraging already approved, generic drugs going after highly unmet and rare needs, 100% in-house without dependencies on partners. Gliomas of the brainstem are aggressive tumors that disproportionately affect children and young adults, with no cures and short life expectancies. It is in a dense and sensitive area of the brain that regulates breathing and heartbeats, making it too dangerous to treat surgically. Chemo and radiation therapies are used with poor efficacy. It is challenging to get them to that part of the brain in a meaningful enough dose without doing more harm than good. This is exactly the kind of unmet need where Bionaut can deliver a smaller but still potent dose, traveling up the spine through the cerebrospinal fluid, directly into the brainstem glioma. The team is on track to getting in the clinic in 2 years, and beyond brainstem gliomas, the platform’s flexibility and customization on bot form factor and size, along with tailored control algorithms and payloads capacities, opens up the possibilities to other brain cancers, neurodegenerative diseases and strokes, to other organs in the body. If you’re interested in advancing this new medical modality, check out their website, the team is hiring.