Six Big Things: The Startup That Thinks Blood Could Be The Fountain Of Youth
Source: PitchBook, Kevin Dowd
Photo: Ambrosia: Can young blood help fight aging?
Ambrosia is a modest company with a modest goal: To inject the blood of young people into the veins of its older clientele in order to fight disease and other signs of aging. And if you’re in the Big Apple and always wanted to feel a little bit more like a vampire, it might be your lucky year.
The startup plans to open its first clinic by the end of 2018 in New York, according to a Business Insider report from earlier this week, and an item about physician employment opportunities in New York is now listed on its website. So, how is this all supposed to work?
Ambrosia’s process begins by buying plasma from blood banks. For $8,000, customers can be transfused with a liter and a half of the stuff. There’s not supposed to be any specific, immediate benefit, and there’s little in the way of clinical evidence to support the idea. Other scientists are skeptical. But founder Jesse Karmazin has reportedly cited improvements in focus, memory, sleep and physical appearance among those who’ve undergone Ambrosia’s treatments already.
Humans have been scared of dying for as long as we’ve been scared of anything. Other humans have been profiting off that fear for just as long. Is the blood of young people the answer we’ve long sought? We may be about to find out—and that’s one of the six big things to know from the past week in the world of startups:
1. Young blood
While Ambrosia hasn’t raised any private funding, a pair of companies with similar aims have. Elevian, which launched with $5.5 million in backing earlier this month, takes a much more targeted approach to the young blood thing, developing treatments centered on a single protein that it believes is the source of youthful plasma’s benefits. Alkahest, the developer of a young plasma-based treatment for Alzheimer’s, has raised $50 million in prior corporate funding from Grifols.
2. Going small(ish)
The past week included at least six unicorns raising new cash at enormous valuations. Two of them, though, kept their round sizes relatively small. “Relatively” is the key word when it comes to payment company Stripe’s $245 million funding—a huge figure in a vacuum, but equivalent to about 1% of its accompanying $20 billion valuation. Cybersecurity startup Darktrace, meanwhile, brought in $50 million at a $1.65 billion valuation in a round led by Vitruvian Partners, with that funding amount equating to 3% of the total valuation.
3. SoftBank’s real estate unicorns
When SoftBank’s involved, going even relatively small isn’t an option. This week, the colossus helped lead a $400 million funding at a $4.4 billion valuation for Compass, which operates a home-selling platform, and pumped another $400 million at an estimated $2 billion valuation into Opendoor, which does the same thing. In the meantime, SoftBank led a whopping $1 billion investment in OYO, valuing the Indian hotel-booking startup at a reported $5 billion.
We presume the Compass and Opendoor platforms are a bit more high-tech than this.
4. Fine time at Uber
The ridehailing company continues to quite literally pay for some of its past deeds. On Wednesday, Uber agreed to a $148 million settlement in the US related to a massive data breach and the resulting cover-up, a scheme the company admitted last year. And in Singapore, Uber and Grab were fined the equivalent of about $9.5 million for competition concerns related to Grab’s takeover of Uber’s services in Southeast Asia.
5. Unicorns go shopping
Barely a month after bringing in new cash at a $7.1 billion valuation, messaging unicorn Slack bought email provider Astro this week. Careem, meanwhile, a Dubai-based ridehailing startup valued at an estimated $1.2 billion, acquired Commut, the operator of a mass transit service. Both companies could soon be part of Uber, which is reportedly in talks to buy Careem for between $2 billion and $2.5 billion.
6. Niu is the new Nio
Earlier this month, an electric car company from China called Nio crossed the Pacific Ocean (plus another couple thousand miles) to go public in New York. This week, an electric scooter company from China called Niu announced its own plans to cross the Pacific Ocean (plus another couple thousand miles) to go public in New York. If an electric bike company called Nia is next, it’s time to get weirded out.