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Reed Jobs, the son of Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs and billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, has closed his investment firm Yosemite's second fund at $350 million as he pursues his goal of making cancer a disease people no longer die from.
The fund reached its target after a first close of $200 million in January. Yosemite's first fund closed in 2024 at $263 million. Investors in the firm include drugmakers Amgen Inc. and AbbVie Inc., the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and venture capitalist John Doerr.
Yosemite works in two ways. It invests in startups early, often taking large stakes, with the aim of earning venture-scale returns. It also gives philanthropic grants to scientists, which Jobs uses to test ideas before putting in bigger money.
"With philanthropy, we can fail really cheaply," Jobs said. "What we've learned is that we can test new ideas really quickly and cheaply in universities with grants."
Companies backed by the first fund include Chai Discovery, which uses artificial intelligence to design drugs, cervical cancer screening company Teal Health, Tune Therapeutics, which develops medicines that switch genes on and off without editing them, and Sage Care, which helps patients find their way through treatment.
A goal short of a cure
Jobs, 35, does not talk about curing cancer. "I don't think you'll cure cancer because we're human," he said, since any cell in the body can turn cancerous. He points instead to HIV and AIDS, which still has no vaccine but is no longer a death sentence in the U.S. because drug combinations keep patients alive. He wants the same for people with cancer.
"I don't think a company alone is going to make cancer non-lethal," he said, adding that he expects progress to come from many groups working together, likely one cancer at a time.
He said the field has moved faster than he expected since he launched Yosemite in 2023, when biotech investing was in a slump, citing advances in GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, immunotherapy, cancer vaccines and pancreatic cancer treatment. "You couldn't have told me four years ago that we'd be sitting here today," he said. Last month he said GLP-1 drugs are "some of the most important drugs we've ever actually seen come to market" and could help in the fight against cancer.
Asked what his father would tell him, Jobs said Steve Jobs would advise him to "stay on the path." "This is a long-term play that's going to take my whole life," he said.
From the family office
Jobs started working in cancer labs as a teenager, when his father was ill, and did an oncology internship at Stanford University at 15. Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer in 2011. Reed Jobs studied at Stanford and later became managing director for health at Emerson Collective, the investment and philanthropy group his mother founded in 2011. Yosemite spun out of Emerson Collective in 2023 and is named after the national park where his parents married in 1991.
Powell Jobs, 62, inherited much of her fortune from her late husband, including shares in Apple and Walt Disney Co. Through Emerson Collective she owns The Atlantic magazine and stakes in sports teams including the Washington Wizards and Washington Capitals.
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