Freeflow Expands Into the UCSF Ecosystem

At Freeflow, we believe the next generation of category-defining companies will emerge from university science – from the labs, clinics, and translational ecosystems where fundamental discoveries first become possible.

That belief has shaped our model from the beginning. We launched around the Caltech ecosystem in 2019, expanded into Berkeley in 2023, and are now deepening our work across California’s scientific network with an expansion into the UCSF ecosystem.

UCSF is a natural next step for Freeflow, but also a deeply personal one for me. I was first introduced to the institution shortly after moving to San Francisco in 2005, and over the years UCSF has become the center of nearly every important healthcare experience in my own life, from primary care to specialty treatment. I’ve experienced firsthand the quality of the clinicians, researchers, and translational infrastructure that make UCSF one of the world’s most important engines for biomedical discovery and translation.

In 2025, UCSF received $824 million in NIH funding, making it the largest public recipient of NIH awards and the second largest overall. UCSF’s Schools of Medicine, Pharmacy, and Dentistry ranked first among their peers, and the School of Nursing ranked first among public institutions.

That scale of research is matched by a deep history of company creation. In particular, Mission Bay has become one of the defining biotech clusters in the country. What we have consistently heard is missing is what we also saw at Caltech and Berkeley: investors willing to meet researchers in the lab to help with the initial steps in translational research, including company formation, team building and capital.

For Freeflow, these data points matter because they reflect exactly what we look for in an ecosystem: world-class science, dense translational infrastructure, experienced faculty founders, clinical proximity, and repeated pathways from discovery to company formation.

Our first step in this expansion is our investment in TippingPoint Biosciences, a UCSF-born therapeutics company developing a new approach to diseases driven by dysfunctional chromatin biology. TippingPoint recently announced a $4.5 million seed financing to advance its platform for targeting epigenetic protein interfaces long considered difficult or impossible to drug, with Freeflow Ventures participating alongside SOSV, LKS Fund, Sazze Partners, StoryHouse Ventures, Sontag Innovation Fund, American Cancer Society BrightEdge, XEIA, and WeCAN.

TippingPoint is also a clear example of the kind of founder and company we aim to support. The company was co-founded by Laura Hsieh, PhD, its CEO, and Geeta Narlikar, PhD, a renowned UCSF chromatin biologist. Hsieh developed the underlying technology during her postdoctoral research in Narlikar’s lab, which has deep expertise in chromatin biology and genome regulation.

That combination is exactly what we seek at the earliest stages: a technically differentiated platform, a large unmet medical need, founders with deep command of the science, and a translational path that can turn academic discovery into a venture-scale company. TippingPoint’s initial focus on Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma, one of the deadliest childhood cancers, reflects the kind of high-stakes problem where breakthrough science is not optional.

Our expansion into UCSF is not a departure from our model. It is a continuation of it.

Freeflow is built around a simple insight: most venture firms have limited and lagging visibility into the flow of discovery from research universities. We aim to identify companies earlier by being embedded within the ecosystems where they originate, building trust with faculty, postdocs, translational leaders, and founders before companies are obvious to the market.

At UCSF, that means engaging with an ecosystem that sits at the center of modern biomedicine: basic biology, therapeutics, clinical medicine, diagnostics, AI-enabled discovery, precision health, and translational infrastructure. It is an environment where the distance between scientific insight and patient impact can be unusually short — and where the right early capital and company-building support can make a meaningful difference.

As we expand across UCSF and the broader UC network, our goal remains consistent: to be the trusted first institutional partner for science founders building companies around breakthrough IP, massive markets, and urgent human and planetary health challenges. Our deep tech thesis has always been rooted in the belief that science-driven innovation can both solve complex global problems and generate substantial venture returns.