Wilbe Insights: Science as the most valuable luxury - and why you should consider investing in Science

The biggest threats to survival are caused by socially induced problems that can be made manageable through science. This is what therapeutics and novel materials achieve. Whichever country and individual has access to the know-how and the ability to develop solutions to security, obesity, depression, fertility, and energy holds the keys to a longer-lasting lifespan and upkeep of generational prosperity. Yes, in the long term, we would wish to be able to solve the above problems at its root by addressing bad habits, engaging in diplomacy with malign agents and education, but at a time of crisis like the one we live in today science is offering a crucial lifeline.

As social scientists and venture operators, we realized that policy moves far slower than capital and individual ingenuity and over the last 5 years we have dedicated our skills to reading signals around what the future may entail and producing contingency plans by identifying the solutions that would be most viable and deploy our venture playbook to empower the selected agents that can deliver these solutions at scale: scientists.

Scientists for a long time have been getting the raw end of the stick. Either recruited by corporates to jump through board-commanded R&D exercises or stuck in academic ecosystems that favor publishing virtues over practical impact. Five years ago we realized that for as long as scientists were hindered from creating freely, all the public and private funding going towards generating solutions to the above challenges would be ineffective. We started envisaging a world where the most technically prepared individuals would also be able to access the research infrastructure, market guidance, and capital network to reduce research timelines and increase success rates. An infrastructure that we have now delivered at Wilbe.

Earlier this month our very own Proxima Fusion (a Fund I venture) was featured in the WSJ, FT, and Bloomberg sharing that their version of nuclear fusion power may be much closer than decades of government investments have been able to achieve. Proxima was founded by Francesco, until November 2022 a postdoc researcher at MIT and Max Planck. The same fall he applied and was selected for our BSF program (then, “Become a Scientist Founder”) equipping him with the skills to pursue his research full-time in the real world: within 2 weeks from incorporating the company with him and a cracking team of co-founders from Cupertino to Cambridge MA, we secured a visionary public-private-partnership and a lead investor to join us in the round. The company in little more than two years has taken a lead role in the sector, securing over $30M in private funding and matching funding from governments. Without energy companies like Proxima, all the goodwill expectations around the potential of AI and the renaissance of industrialization in the Western World are wishful thinking. We started taking an interest in Proxima at a time when most governments were solely focused on alternative energy like solar and wind, ineffective for the problem at hand: we read the social signals and picked a contrarian view to identify and support Francesco when others thought it impossible.

Fertility serves a similar use case on the importance of contingency planning. Birth rates are disturbingly lower than the replacement rate in many countries. For reference, there is no historical evidence of a civilization that has managed to recover from a negative rate meaning that all countries in the Western World and large parts of Asia including Japan are on a slow but inevitable trajectory towards disappearance. We understand that behaviors are the last to change, including at a time of crisis and we are thankfully able to appeal to science to provide a catalyst. When the world was talking pro-choice, we interpreted choice to include the ability to procreate in a way that fits with the working customs of this century’s mothers. U-ploid Biotechnologies was born in 2023 with the mission of rejuvenating aged eggs and restoring the quality to that of a woman in her early twenties, demonstrating this in mice already, exhibiting its findings at the JPM Healthcare Conference earlier this year and securing partnerships with IVF clinics. We incorporated this company with Alexandre, who spent a decade researching egg behaviours at UCLA and Max Planck, and like Francesco after our BSF program, decided to renounce a career in academia to build his ideas in the real world. He attended our program, we supported him throughout the process, introduced him to Jordan, his now co-founder, a doctor, MBA Schwarzman Scholar and also a graduate from our program, signed the first check alongside a fertility specialist fund and currently supporting them with the ethics, market, and regulatory pathways. It helps that Annalisa, our venture partner, was on the science advisory board of the FDA for nearly a decade.

To drive the point home I could of course have referred to the use of science in defence, from robotics to cryptography, and the growing interest in our work from thinkers and stakeholders from DC to Brussels and Japan. Shelter and security are after all the first privilege discovered by human kind and science offers an unparalleled access to that. For this first Insight I feel that the energy and fertility instances above serve as a far brighter narrative and closer to what we feel the world should be prioritizing.

At this stage it’s hard not to be tempted to blow smoke up our asses, we are clearly very proud of how our scientist founders perform and the sheer quality of what we’re gearing up to deliver. We have proven that scientists can become the leaders of high-performance companies and through venture capital we are making the upside of their work accessible to private investors: those who have, are very happy with their decision to start investing in science. As a non-scientist I remember the privilege of being able to sit next to a scientist that was able to make me understand their work and I realize that besides returns, what we end up offering to those that align with our work is intelligence: the kind of insight that sits closest to prediction and that can shape multi-generational planning in these times.