Reed Jobs’ Yosemite Raises $350M to Fight Cancer
Quick Read
- Reed Jobs, Steve Jobs’ son, runs Yosemite, a venture firm that only invests in cancer research. It’s raising a $350 million second fund, adding to close to 25 portfolio companies built from early academic science.
- What makes Yosemite unusual is that it gives free grants to university labs before ever investing, which helps it spot breakthroughs early.
- The firm is targeting cancer genes like p53 that scientists long thought were impossible to treat with drugs. For Reed Jobs, it’s personal, his father died of pancreatic cancer, and he’s built an entire venture firm around the idea that cancer shouldn’t be a death sentence.
Reed Jobs, son of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, has built Yosemite into one of biotech’s most closely watched cancer-focused venture firms since founding it in 2023. The firm, named after the national park where his parents got married, raised a first fund of $263 million and has since backed roughly 20 companies, including gene therapy firm Tune Therapeutics and AI drug developer Chai Discovery.
Yosemite is now targeting $350 million for its second fund, with close to 25 companies across both funds in its portfolio so far. Investors in the new fund include biotech giant Amgen, Memorial Sloan Kettering, MIT, and venture capitalist John Doerr, alongside Jobs’ mother Laurene Powell Jobs, who invested through her philanthropy Emerson Collective.
What sets Yosemite apart is its dual model.
Alongside traditional venture investing, the firm hands out no-strings-attached grants to academic labs to de-risk early-stage science, an approach that has already produced spinouts like Azalea Therapeutics, born from a grant to Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna’s lab. AI has become central to that work too, accelerating drug discovery and clinical trial design faster than Jobs expected when he launched the firm.
Yosemite is now chasing cancer targets long considered undruggable, including the gene p53, the most frequently suppressed gene in human cancer, alongside KRAS. The firm operates exclusively in oncology, which Jobs says makes up roughly 40 percent of all biotech, and prefers building companies from scratch out of early academic research rather than waiting for pharma to make the next breakthrough.
The mission traces back to personal loss. Jobs was 12 when his father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and Steve Jobs died of the disease eight years later. Some people inherit money. Reed inherited a mission, and Yosemite’s growing portfolio suggests he’s quietly building the infrastructure to pursue it at global scale.
