The San Francisco firm has closed its third fund at $114 million, its largest to date, betting that AI and biology are now inseparable, and that the founders who understand both will build the companies that matter most.
Lindy Fishburne started Breakout in a somewhat unusual place: inside the Thiel Foundation, running a grant programme called Breakout Labs that handed speculative cheques to scientist-entrepreneurs working on problems too radical for traditional venture capital and too commercially oriented for academic funding. That was 2011.
By 2016 it was obvious that some of these companies needed more than grants. In 2017, Fishburne and her colleague Julia Moore closed a $60 million venture fund. In 2021 they raised $112.5 million. On Tuesday, the firm announced the close of Fund III at $114 million, its largest to date.
Breakout Ventures describes Fund III as AI-focused, which in 2026 is not exactly a differentiating claim. What it means in practice is narrower and more interesting: the firm believes that the most valuable AI opportunities in biology are not chatbots or administrative tools but systems that can genuinely accelerate how science turns into medicine. Drug discovery. Diagnostics. Neurotechnology. Materials. The convergence of computation and the lab bench.
The fund brings the firm’s total assets under management to more than $230 million across three vehicles. Fishburne and Moore remain managing partners. The team has expanded to include Dana Watt, a diagnostics founder and partner; Nima Ronaghi, an organic chemist who joined as partner to focus on the scientist-to-founder transition; along with an operational team including CFO James Chan, general counsel Ziv Yoash, and director of platform Susanna Harris.
The portfolio that Breakout has assembled across its earlier funds gives some indication of what it means by the intersection of biology and technology. Noetik, one of its more recent bets, is an AI-native biotech using self-supervised machine learning on spatial multimodal data from human tumours to discover cancer immunotherapies; it raised a $40 million Series A in 2024 led by Polaris Partners with participation from Khosla Ventures.
Phantom Neuro, another portfolio company, uses neural signal processing to give prosthetic limb users intuitive control; it raised a $19 million Series A in 2025 led by Ottobock, the German prosthetics giant. ZymoChem, backed by Breakout and led by the firm in a $21 million Series A in 2024, is using enzymes to manufacture bio-based chemicals cost-competitively with petroleum. A portfolio exit also arrived in 2025: Surf Bio was acquired by Halozyme for $400 million.
What unites those companies is not a therapeutic area or a technology modality. It is a founder profile: scientists who think like engineers, who build fast, and who are working on problems where the commercial moat is the science itself. Fishburne has been consistent on this for fifteen years.
The conviction looks better-timed than it once did. The argument that AI would reshape biology moved from fringe thesis to mainstream assumption sometime around 2022 and has only accelerated since. AlphaFold changed what protein structure prediction looks like. Foundation models are being trained on genomics, proteomics, and spatial omics data. A new generation of companies, many of them Breakout’s portfolio, is building at that frontier with tools that did not exist a decade ago and that are compressing timelines in ways the industry is still absorbing.
Fund III will deploy capital at pre-seed through Series A stage, continuing the firm’s historical pattern of writing the first institutional cheque into science-driven companies, then following on as they scale. T
he sectors remain consistent with prior funds: biotech and life sciences, healthcare and digital health, robotics and automation, and what the firm describes as developer tools and infrastructure, the enabling layer of computation that the rest of the portfolio depends on.
For a firm that began as a grant programme for ideas too speculative to attract investment, $114 million represents a very particular kind of vindication. The science Breakout backed in 2011 and 2012 looked radical then. Most of it looks inevitable now.
