SciFounders

The three principals — Matt Krisiloff, Lucas Harrington, and Alexander Schubert — operate as a partnership. Each brings distinct scientific-operating experience: Krisiloff from OpenAI and Conception, Harrington from Mammoth Biosciences and UC Berkeley's Doudna lab, Schubert from Genentech. Investment decisions are made collaboratively by the trio, without a separate investment committee.

The firm sources almost entirely through scientific-network referrals and its SciFounder Fellowship program. Fellows receive up to $1 million and hands-on mentorship from operators who have built genomics and biotech companies themselves. This creates a proprietary scientist-to-founder pipeline that competes with traditional accelerator models on technical credibility rather than speed or cohort size.

SciFounders occupies a hybrid space. It operates like a venture firm by taking equity in external startups from pre-seed to Series A, but its fellowship model — writing up to $1 million to help a postdoc start a company with direct operating mentorship — resembles a venture studio. The principals also run their own operating companies (Mammoth, Conception) alongside the investment vehicle, making the structure closer to a distributed foundry than a traditional fund.

Based on available public information, SciFounders makes only direct equity investments in operating companies. There is no evidence they participate as limited partners in other venture funds or invest in fund-of-funds structures. Their capital deployment is direct, from early-stage equity to the SciFounder Fellowship awards.

SciFounders explicitly invests from idea stage up to Series A. The SciFounder Fellowship is designed for technical founders who have not yet incorporated, while their broader investment activity extends through early institutional rounds. This covers everything from pre-incorporation lab builds to post-seed therapeutic development.

The relationship is co-foundational. Lucas Harrington co-founded Mammoth Biosciences with Jennifer Doudna and serves as its CSO; Matt Krisiloff is CEO of Conception. SciFounders itself is an investment firm run by these same operators. The companies are separate entities, but the investing team's ongoing R&D work at Mammoth and Conception directly informs their scientific sourcing and diligence at SciFounders.

SciFounders has not publicly disclosed a source of wealth. It likely represents personal capital from the founding principals, potentially supplemented by external limited partners, but neither the capital base nor its origin is publicly available.