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Humanity’s ingenuity is combinatorially infinite; unfortunately, so are the bureaucracies that constrain it. Leading scientists and technologists assiduously work to unlock an experimental breakthrough for years, only to discover that transitioning their discovery into the wider world is riven with challenges.

Sometimes the friction is the intellectual property procedures of a university, or the logistics of spinning out an under-funded and under-prioritized corporate team. Sometimes the restriction is setting up a business to be fully and optimally capitalized for the technical and scaling developments ahead. Sometimes the limit is simply aggregating talent, of accelerating centripetal force to bring interested but employed teammates, advisors, and partners together. Often, it’s all three and more.

Over the past two decades, Lux has seen time and again that excellent ideas ready for transition to the real world remain mired in academic and corporate research labs. What these ideas need is the scaffolding of a new kind of lab: one where experimentation is replaced with entrepreneurship, but with the same ethos of rapid learning, communal responsibility, and the ambitious dreams of indefatigable leaders.

We are pleased to announce today the official launch of Lux Labs, an initiative by Lux Capital, where we conceive ideas at the edge of possibility, transition those concepts from sci-fi to sci-fact, and then launch transformative ventures. We bring all of our collective team wisdom and experience to bear on proven ideas that can transform human wellness, expand our reach and capabilities in all domains, from the sea and cosmos to the physical and cyber worlds, as well as open whole new vistas of experimentation and expression from the inner space of techbio to the latent space of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Lux Labs formalizes a pattern that we have used repeatedly and to great success across Lux’s funds, where we partner with ambitious people with brilliant and proven ideas and offer them an entrepreneurial pathway to transition from the intellectual ferment of the research lab into the competitive free-for-all of the marketplace.

What does that assistance look like? While our experience shows that no two ideas will follow exactly the same course, commonalities include: negotiating the legalities and politics of securing the right intellectual property rights; incorporating and setting up a startup for growth; capitalizing the business from our own funds as well as those of trusted and strategic partners to ensure that technical and product milestones are achievable; recruiting and promoting the newly-conceived company to valuable technical networks; and advising and guiding the early stages of startup maturation so that even first-time founders can avoid the deadly mistakes we’ve identified across decades of accumulated collective wisdom.

While we are formalizing Lux Labs, we have been informally conducting this work for many years now across more than 20 companies, including Aeva (next-generation sensing system for autonomous vehicles), Aera (developing transformative genetic medicines), Cajal Neuroscience (medicines for neurodegenerative disease), Kymeta (metamaterials-based satellite antennas), Kala Pharmaceuticals (nanoparticle-based treatments for ocular diseases), Kallyope (transformational therapeutics in gut-brain biology), Kurion (nuclear waste cleanup), Mendaera (advanced technology for healthcare), Osmo (generative AI to create a new generation of better, safer, environmentally-friendly aroma molecules) and Variant Bio (unearthing genetic outliers to advance therapies).

We intend to accelerate Lux Labs in parallel with our traditional startup investing, where we continue  to fund companies with checks ranging from $100,000 to $100 million. While we expect the vast majority of our capital will continue to be deployed in traditional venture investing, Lux Labs offers an alternative paradigm for potential success.

We’ve seen with our own eyes how transformative people and ideas with the potential to radically improve humanity can remain shackled indefinitely by the misaligned impulses of human institutions. Lux Labs is an opportunity to free these people and ideas to grow, scale and make the impact they always dreamed they would make.

Onwards.