At Freeflow Ventures, our investment thesis is straightforward: we back scientific founders who are insatiably curious about massive challenges and capable of building transformative companies to solve them. Many of those founders emerge from world-class research environments, and over the past several years the Berkeley ecosystem — UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Bakar Labs, and the surrounding scientific community — has become one of the most compelling sources of this talent.
Berkeley leads the world in startup creation, but the most technical teams, those spinning out deep tech breakthroughs, have been underserved by venture. With a pipeline of 600 scientists and five investments from Berkeley already, we’re seeing the scale of that gap firsthand and feel that Berkeley has entered a generational moment in deep tech company formation.
Our relationship with Berkeley has grown deeper through the involvement of Freeflow Scientific Advisor Dave Schaffer, whose leadership across both Berkeley and Bakar Labs has helped shape a culture where entrepreneurial science can thrive. Combined with our collaborations with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, we’ve had a front-row seat to breakthroughs capable of becoming category-defining companies.
This environment has produced a cluster of founders and technologies aligned tightly with our thesis. Below is a brief snapshot for the five Berkeley-connected companies we’ve backed — and why each one represents a credible attempt at solving problems that matter on a global scale.
CatenaBio grew out of work in the labs of Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna and Matt Francis, where co-founder Marco Lobba helped develop a platform for producing multi-payload antibody–drug conjugates (ADCs). The goal is direct: overcome the drug-resistance that often limits today’s targeted cancer therapies.
CatenaBio’s approach — delivering multiple mechanisms of action on a single antibody — is an elegant answer to a hard problem in oncology: tumors adapt quickly. Multi-payload ADCs can hit several biological pathways at once, reducing the odds of resistance emerging.
We invested because the thesis is clear: if you can reliably deliver multiple synergistic therapies to the same tumor cell, you can expand the boundaries of what targeted cancer medicines can treat. The founding team’s technical depth, combined with Berkeley’s leadership in chemical biology, makes this a credible shot at redefining next-gen ADCs.
Miist is building a heat-free inhaled drug delivery technology capable of moving drugs into the bloodstream within seconds. Their anchor product — rapid relief for migraines — is a large and underserved market where speed is the primary determinant of therapeutic success.
More broadly, Miist’s platform could reshape how acute treatments (from migraines to anxiety) are delivered. The thesis aligns directly with our framework: Certain therapeutic categories are constrained only by slow pharmacokinetics; unlock speed, unlock new markets.
With a Berkeley-trained founder and compelling clinical data, Miist represents a platform with both near-term verticals and long-term optionality.
Izote emerged from research in Berkeley’s Energy Biosciences Institute and addresses a foundational bottleneck in synthetic biology: biomanufacturing is still too expensive for most large-scale chemicals.
Izote’s perchlorate-respiration system enables engineered microbes to operate as though oxygen-rich, while fermenting under low-oxygen, low-cost conditions. The implication is major: step-change improvements in productivity and capital cost efficiency.
Our thesis here: If biomanufacturing can meet petroleum-based cost structures, entire industrial categories flip to sustainable alternatives. Izote is one of the few companies attacking this problem at the level that truly moves the needle.
Vivere is a cancer therapy platform company founded by Berkeley leaders including Dave Schaffer and John Dueber, alongside returning founder and Berkeley Ph.D. Melissa Kotterman. Leveraging technology developed at UC Berkeley, Vivere’s team of scientists uses a proprietary bioengineering platform to design safe, targeted and more effective cancer-fighting therapies. The platform is based on over 25 years of academic and industry research and will enable the development of products capable of breaking through the immunological tolerance of tumors.
This fits our thesis because: Platforms that expand the engineering space for complex biologics tend to create multiple shots on goal across oncology. Add to that a founding team with a track record of translating Berkeley technologies into commercial therapeutics, and Vivere stands out as a high-conviction bet.
Erg Bio, spun out of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the Joint BioEnergy Institute, is building a bioprocess for turning abundant waste biomass into sustainable aviation fuel, rubber intermediates, and specialty chemicals at costs competitive with petroleum.
The technology combines solvent-based biomass pretreatment from LBNL with engineered strains capable of consolidated bioprocessing — eliminating expensive enzymes and intermediate steps.
The core thesis:
Decarbonizing aviation and industrial chemicals requires cost-competitive alternatives, not premium green substitutes.Erg Bio is one of the few teams in the space with technical evidence that they can achieve that threshold.
These five companies illustrate what we look for: founders with insatiable curiosity, working on unmet problem areas, backed by scientific depth that gives them a credible path to becoming billion dollar companies. If that sounds like you, please reach out to me.
