Billionaires Bezos and Gates join $188 million round for AI drug discovery firm

Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment firm of Jeff Bezos, and Gates Frontier, Bill Gates's venture capital firm, both took part in a $188 million Series E round for LifeMine Therapeutics, a company that uses artificial intelligence to analyse fungal genomes in the search for new drugs.

Neither disclosed how much it invested. LifeMine is testing a compound intended to prevent organ failure in transplant recipients.

Family offices of the ultra-wealthy made 52 direct investments in private companies during August, with biotech startups accounting for about 20 percent of those transactions, according to data from the private wealth intelligence platform Fintrx, provided to CNBC.

Stanley Druckenmiller's Duquesne Family Office, which CNBC describes as one of the most active in the United States, has backed at least four pharmaceutical or life sciences companies this year, Fintrx data shows. In August it took part in a $90 million Series C for Epicrispr Biotechnologies, an eight-year-old company developing gene therapy for facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, a rare muscle disorder.

Druckenmiller said in January that Duquesne had made substantial biotech investments because of the potential of artificial intelligence.

"I knew because I've been on the board of Memorial Sloan Kettering for 30 years, that probably the best use case out there of AI is biotech through drug discovery, diagnostics, monitoring everything," he said in an interview conducted by Morgan Stanley.

Biopharma startups in the United States and Europe raised $12.6 billion in the first half of 2026, a five-year high, according to analysis by Silicon Valley Bank, now a division of First Citizens Bank.

Investors are writing fewer cheques overall, however, particularly for early-stage companies, with a greater share of funding going to companies that already have drugs in testing according to SVB's analysis, which draws on its own data and PitchBook's.