Fifty Years

Fifty Years

Fifty Years was founded in 2016 by Seth Bannon and Ela Madej, both former founders who struggled to find investors fluent in mission-driven deep tech. The firm builds companies at the intersection of hard science and enormous markets, and its investor base of 46 unicorn and decacorn founders—spanning $1B to $100B outcomes—forms a league of mentors whose shoulders portfolio companies stand on. The firm runs its own initiatives, including Manifest Grants for translational science and a Spinout Playbook for academic founders, reinforcing an identity that is itself a startup. Fifty Years writes pre-seed and seed checks into a generalist but deeptech-heavy mandate. The firm targets climate tech, synthetic biology, space tech, health, connectivity, and food tech—always requiring that a company could build a massive business while solving a global problem. In practice, this means backing factory-manufactured nuclear microreactors, enzymatic chemical manufacturing, single-molecule diagnostics, and advanced satellites for high orbits. The firm sources globally but strongly prefers initial go-to-market in North America or Europe. Its founders have authored more than 4,100 papers and generated over 355,000 citations, translating bench science into companies via direct company-building support and a tightly curated LP network. A 15-person team operates from San Francisco, Palo Alto, and London, with UK leads Vaitea Cowan and Steph Avraamides anchoring the European presence. The partnership in 2024 added D. Scott Phoenix, former CEO of Vicarious AI (raised $250M, acquired by Alphabet), and Alex Teng, a Caltech PhD in environmental science. In June 2025 the firm announced that applications would open for its next 5050 program, an initiative that helps scientists and engineers start deep tech companies—signaling a steady cadence of founder-formation programming as a core operating rhythm. The firm also counts Nobel laureate Arthur B. McDonald as an inspiration for its culture, though the capital structure remains intentionally lean and undisclosed. The defining architecture of Fifty Years is not fee-based but network-permissioned: the firm is backed exclusively by 46 founders of billion-dollar-plus tech companies who actively mentor the portfolio. This creates a single-layer sourcing and support model in which technical founders get capital from operators who have already scaled science into commerce. The result is a venture firm that behaves like a founder cooperative, where the GP team builds tooling—5050, Manifest Grants, Spinout Playbook—as if they were still product founders themselves.