Today Valinor announced it has raised $13m in funding from Pelion, Harpoon, CRV, and others. We could not be more thrilled to co-lead this round with several incredible investors. I wanted to share a few thoughts about why we knew we had to invest.
About 2 months ago I had my close friend Larsen Jensen, the founder of Harpoon Ventures, on the IO Podcast. Shortly after, he sent me this email:
“Tyler, I want to work together on more companies. I need to introduce you to Josh Pacini. He is an absolute killer, and one of the best founders we’ve ever worked with….progress has been amazing”
I was stoked to meet someone with Utah roots that I didn’t know, who came so highly recommended from a trusted source. I don’t often get that strong of a reference from that strong of a referrer.
After we met with Josh, I sent Larsen this text:
Some people just blow you away from the first meeting, and that is Josh.
When that happens, I do one thing: I dig deeper, and figure out if I get more excited, or less.
In this case, the more I dug the more ecstatic I got.
After some customer calls, a bunch of research, and one more meeting with Josh, we offered to write a large check out of Pelion’s seed program.
The day he signed I happily tweeted this:
So what is Valinor?
Very briefly:
Pharmaceutical companies are not actually struggling from a lack of ideas for new drugs. This is not the bottleneck. The actual bottleneck is clinical trial success – the step where 90% of drug programs go to fail. Going a layer deeper, the underlying reason why clinical drugs trials fail is in large part due to unsuccessful patient selection. That is, it’s very hard to select the right type of patient that is most likely to see results from your particular drug. Choosing the wrong patient set has disastrous consequences: you might fail a trial that otherwise would succeed – a false negative – and this has life and death implications.
Valinor’s insight was incredibly valuable: what if we generated the best biological datasets in the world from patient-derived tissue and blood samples – and trained the world’s best model at predicting patient response?
That simple insight could have profound implications for our world, and for Valinor as a company.
If Valinor succeeds, we will see much higher success rates on some of our most groundbreaking therapeutic innovations. Valinor will be a required part of every pharmaceutical company’s testing process, and as a result,will change how new medicines come to market.
On top of this unique insight, we realized something else about Josh: he was an incredible recruiter. He was landing candidates that he had no right on paper to win. Several of the most highly respected ML researchers and translational scientists in this space have joined Valinor already, a company just a mere few months old. When we talked to these individuals they all said the same thing: Josh is incredible, this is hands down the right problem to be working on, and we know this is going to succeed. “It feels inevitable.”
Andy Rachleff taught me that there are two types of risks you can take as an early stage investor: technical risk, and market risk. In his view, you never wanted to take market risk, but you’d love to take technical risk. What does this mean? It means to invest in things that, if they work, will no doubt find exceptional product market fit, because the market is clearly desperate for it. You can methodically kill technical risk by hiring talented engineers and brilliant technical minds to build what you need to build, but you cannot kill market risk unless you build what people desperately want. Valinor is exactly that type of company: if they succeed, the market is desperate for it. That much is clear.
So, the only question is whether they will succeed in creating this model that changes drug development and effectively removes the technical risk. The early signs of this are great.
We have deep conviction that they will succeed. Valinor’s early case studies are looking incredibly strong, the talent density momentum is accelerating, and Valinor is starting to feel like all generational startups start to feel.
Inevitable.
We could not be more proud to partner with Josh and the Valinor team. They are always looking for top machine learning talent. If you are interested, please reach out to Josh directly on x.
always happy; never satisfied 