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Nest.Bio Ventures
Weis and his partners — Cheryl Cui, Hingge Hsu, and Daphne Teo with venture partners Xi Chen, Steven Landau, and Jeffrey Lu — founded Nest.Bio in 2018.
Nest.Bio Ventures
Weis and his partners — Cheryl Cui, Hingge Hsu, and Daphne Teo with venture partners Xi Chen, Steven Landau, and Jeffrey Lu — founded Nest.Bio in 2018. The firm operates from Cambridge, Massachusetts, the densest biotechnology cluster in the United States. Unlike most venture franchises that raise blind-pool funds and source deals through networks, Nest.Bio builds its pipeline by offering private wet-lab and office space to therapeutics startups, then selecting residents for direct investment. Nest.Bio targets therapeutics companies at seed, start-up, and expansion stages. It invests from a dedicated venture vehicle while Hatch.Bio Labs, its sister real-asset entity, leases shared and private labs in Kendall Square. The structure gives Nest.Bio early visibility into tenant progress — burn rates, hiring velocity, assay data — before making funding decisions. The resident and graduate community has grown past 50 companies and created more than 1,000 local jobs; alumni collectively hold over $7 billion in market capitalization. The firm's website flags a team background spanning machine learning, immunotherapy, and synthetic biology, suggesting active coverage of tech-bio and precision-medicine disciplines. Nest.Bio does not publicly disclose assets under management or total capital deployed. Its website highlights a dual operating-company and investment-vehicle architecture, with Hatch.Bio Labs serving as the lab-operations entity under the same Partner group. The team lists four partners, three venture partners, and one advisor — a lean structure consistent with an operator-heavy model that sources investments through tenancy rather than traditional fund-raising roadshows. Daphne Teo also serves as CEO of NSG BioLabs, a Singapore-based co-working lab platform, hinting at a potential parallel model in Asia. Nest.Bio's structural differentiator is the fusion of a real-estate operating business with a venture portfolio: it collects lab rent while earning equity upside from the same tenants. That hybrid design gives it a proprietary sourcing lane that pure financial venture firms cannot replicate without building physical infrastructure, and it concentrates the partnership's time on companies they can observe day to day rather than on external deal origination.
General information
Firm type
Private Equity
Year founded
2018
Location
Region
North America
Country
United States
City
Cambridge
Corporate office
Cambridge, MA, United States
Principals
James Weis
Partner, CEO Nest.Bio Labs and Hatch.Bio Labs
Cheryl Cui
Partner
Hingge Hsu
Partner
Daphne Teo
Partner, CEO NSG BioLabs
Xi Chen
Venture Partner
Steven Landau
Venture Partner
Jeffrey Lu
Venture Partner
Tim Lu
Advisor
Sector focus
Frequently asked questions
How does Nest.Bio Ventures source its investments?
Nest.Bio Ventures generates proprietary deal flow through its own lab infrastructure. The firm operates Nest.Bio Labs and Hatch.Bio Labs in Kendall Square, Cambridge, where resident biotech companies lease shared or private wet-lab and office space. The proximity lets the investment team observe company progress directly and move early on equity positions in the most promising tenants. External startups are considered, but the resident-graduate funnel forms the core of its sourcing model.
Does Nest.Bio Ventures make direct investments or commit to external funds?
Nest.Bio Ventures makes direct equity investments in early-stage biotechnology and therapeutics companies. The firm’s public materials describe a model where it works alongside founders to develop, fund, and commercialize their technologies, with no mention of participating as a limited partner in third-party venture funds. The structure centers on direct, company-level exposure sourced predominantly from its resident-company pipeline.
What investment stages does the firm target?
Nest.Bio Ventures covers a broad range from seed and start-up through growth and late-stage venture, with a clear tilt toward the earliest stages. The firm’s resident companies span early-stage R&D through expansion-stage enterprises, and its own capital is deployed flexibly along that curve. The incubator environment naturally emphasizes formation-stage therapeutics companies, which can access both lab infrastructure and first institutional capital through the platform.
Who makes the final investment decisions at Nest.Bio Ventures?
The firm lists Partners James Weis, Cheryl Cui, Hingge Hsu, and Daphne Teo as the core investment leadership, supported by Venture Partners Xi Chen, Steven Landau, and Jeffrey Lu. The public team page does not specify an investment committee or indicate whether decisions require unanimity among the Partners. The concentrated partner group suggests investment approvals remain with this small group of named principals.
Is Nest.Bio Ventures a single-family office or a traditional venture firm?
Nest.Bio Ventures is structured as a private-equity asset manager, not a family office. No public disclosure ties the firm’s capital to a single-family wealth source. Its investment activities are administered by a partnership group, and its lab real estate operates under a separate but affiliated vehicle, Hatch.Bio Labs, with its own business development leadership and site-management team.
What is the relationship between Nest.Bio Labs, Hatch.Bio Labs, and the venture arm?
Nest.Bio Labs and its successor brand Hatch.Bio Labs provide shared and private wet-lab and office space to resident biotech startups. Nest.Bio Ventures is the affiliated investment entity that selects a subset of those startups for direct equity funding. James Weis is CEO of both the lab operations and the venture entity, and the websites are hosted on a single nest.bio domain, signaling integrated governance even as the lab and venture activities remain operationally distinct.
Does the firm have any philanthropic or non-profit structures?
The firm’s public materials do not reference any philanthropic foundation, donor-advised fund, or non-profit entity attached to Nest.Bio Ventures or its lab operations. The entire platform appears commercially oriented, focused on for-profit biotech incubation and direct venture investing.
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