Breakout Ventures
VC Fund
San Francisco, United States
Breakout Ventures is a new, early stage fund that backs bold scientist entrepreneurs working at the intersections of technology, biology, materials, and energy.
- Total investments:
- 37
- Last investment:
- Lead investor:
- 27%
- Fund size:
- $114M
- Last fund:
Last updated:
For AI agents: llms.txt
Industries Breakout Ventures invests in
Stages Breakout Ventures invests in
Countries Breakout Ventures invests in
Round sizes
Contacts
| Name | Phone | Socials | |
|---|---|---|---|
Round size
- Seed
- $3.3M–$20M
- Series A
- $2.7M–$65M
- Series B
- $7.2M–$130M
Investment Focus
Industry
- Biotechnology 15 (41%)
- Life Science 7 (19%)
- Therapeutics 6 (16%)
- Chemical 5 (14%)
- Health Care 5 (14%)
Stage
- Seed 12 (32%)
- Series A 9 (24%)
- Series B 8 (22%)
- Debt Financing 2 (5%)
- Venture - Series Unknown 2 (5%)
Team
| Name | Title | Investments | Links | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Dana Watt
Principal
|
Principal | Total investments: 1 | Find email | |
Lindy Fishburne
Managing Partner & Founder
|
Managing Partner & Founder | Total investments: 7 | Find email | |
Nima Ronaghi
Associate
|
Associate | Total investments: 0 | Find email | |
Renee Shenton
Head of Community
|
Head of Community | Total investments: 0 | Find email |
Investments
| Company | Description | Round | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transfyr builds AI tools that help transfer scientific research into real-world applications and innovation. | $25M / Seed / Aug 26, 2026 | ||
| AquaPoro is a Developer of atmospheric water-generating devices intended to break through materials science for industrial-scale moisture capture in arid environments. The company's proprietary technology is poised to transform global water infrastructure, creating a more resilient and sustainable future for our planet, enabling customers toproduce clean water from vapor. | $5M / Seed / Jun 24, 2026 | ||
| Copernic Catalysts develops sustainable chemical catalysts and processes. | $8M / Seed / Nov 12, 2024 | ||
| Passkey Therapeutics is pioneering a new class of medicines, Synergistic Multifunctional Therapeutics (SMThs). It is designed to address complex diseases by targeting rare combinations of proteins that work together. | $20M / Seed / Oct 22, 2024 | ||
| Categorized is a medical technology company that revolutionizes diagnostics using cell mechanics and machine learning. The company was founded in 2013 by Ajay Shah and Dino Di Carlo and is based in San Francisco, California, United States. | $100M / Series D / Oct 10, 2024 | ||
| The world they live in is built from petroleum. The paints on their walls, the carpets in their homes, the tires on their cars, the plastics for everyday consumer goods – these and many more products are made from chemicals that are mostly made from petroleum, creating a $3 trillion/yr industry. To fulfill their dependency on petroleum, theydo crazy things like setting up oil rigs in the middle of the ocean and drilling several miles into the ocean floor! They’ve done these things because they have had no alternative to meet their needs. Not anymore!Over the past decade, advances in engineering microorganisms have afforded us the opportunity to make the same chemicals that are traditionally made from petroleum. Instead of requiring raw materials buried deep within the earth, microbes can use abundant and renewable sources of carbon such as sugars during processes akin to brewing beer. Despite the numerous advantages, making chemicals this way at the industrial level is still rare. This is because it’s still more expensive than using petroleum for producing the chemicals. Although a few challenges need to be solved to usher in the era of renewable chemicals, a fundamental constraint that limits the economic competitiveness of using microbes is the loss of at least 33% of the carbon as carbon dioxide waste during the fermentation – think of this as the head on your beer. Because of this carbon loss, potential product is simply not made. In technical terms, the maximum achievable yields are 67%. As sugars are the most expensive component of a bioprocess, making the carbon dioxide waste translates to as much as 20% of total costs, which severely hampers the economics of the bioprocess and its competitiveness with petroleum-based production methods.At ZymoChem, they are re-imagining the microbe, one that is designed to eliminate (or substantially reduce) carbon loss during the production of chemicals. To do this, they had to design a completely new biosynthetic pathway – one that doesn’t exist in nature – to make the chemicals. Each individual step of this pathway is designed to not lose carbon as carbon dioxide, enabling their biosynthetic pathway to retain all of the sugar’s carbon into the final chemical product. This carbon conservation allows their approach to have superior theoretical yields, up to 50% better than existing state-of-the-art technology! In turn, their technology has the potential to substantially lower production costs and drastically improve cost-competitiveness for making a variety of chemicals from renewable sources, even at today's oil prices. | $21M / Series A / Jan 15, 2024 | ||
| TFC Therapeutics is a biotechnology company developing novel biologics to target and eliminate key drivers of cancer. | Seed / Aug 17, 2023 | ||
| A-Alpha Bio provides cell-based tools for quantitative and high-throughput measurements of protein interactions, accelerating target discovery, library screening, and preclinical drug characterization. A-Alpha Bio's product, AlphaSeq, is a revolutionary cell-based platform technology that will fundamentally change the way that proteininteractions are measured.A-Alpha Bio is a team of synthetic biologists, structural biologists, and next-generation sequencing experts who have come together to remove this industry-wide bottleneck. | $22.4M / Series A / Jul 25, 2023 | ||
| Parallel Bio develops tools that help in the discovery and development of immunotherapies, to eliminate current barriers and create the fastest path to a drug that works. Parallel Bio's platform combines best-in-class human immune organoids with computational methods to generate unprecedented insights into human health and disease. | $4.3M / Seed / Dec 20, 2022 | ||
| EnPlusOne Biosciences provides innovative solutions for emerging RNA therapeutics. | $12M / Seed / Sep 30, 2022 | ||
| See all 37 investments → | |||
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FAQ
What does Breakout Ventures invest in?
Breakout Ventures invests primarily in Biotechnology, Life Science and Therapeutics startups, most often at Seed and Series A stage. Most of the 37 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.
What round sizes does Breakout Ventures invest in?
Breakout Ventures typically joins rounds of $3.3M–$20M at Seed, $2.7M–$65M at Series A and $7.2M–$130M at Series B. These are whole funding-round sizes, not Breakout Ventures's own check, which is rarely disclosed: the 10th–90th percentile of the confirmed public funding rounds Breakout Ventures took part in.
How do I contact Breakout Ventures?
Public channels for Breakout Ventures include LinkedIn and the website linked on this profile. For a verified work email and phone number, create a free Shizune account — contact data is searched across 20+ sources and validated before delivery, so your outreach lands in the right inbox.
Who are the partners at Breakout Ventures?
The team at Breakout Ventures includes Dana Watt (Principal), Lindy Fishburne (Managing Partner & Founder) and Nima Ronaghi (Associate). The Team section lists each member with their title, investment count and links.
Is Shizune's investor data accurate?
Yes — every stat on this profile is calculated from confirmed public funding rounds monitored across hundreds of sources since 2020. This profile was last refreshed in Oct 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.
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