One year down, decades to go
Dec 31, 2019 was the last day as CEO of my last company Medlanes (now exited to Zava). I’ve been running Tomorrow Biostasis for a bit more than a year now. It’s a good time to look back for the first time.
Tomorrow Biostasis is part of a larger mission to build a large-scale and high-quality medical biostasis organization. I’ve shared the logic behind the mission here: My next 20+ years towards a moonshot. In (very) short: living is good, living longer is better and would help build a better world, current medicine will not enable us to live longer any time soon, so building a biostasis company offers a tangible solution now. This of course is a complex topic, I’ll continue to cover the topic from different angles here.
1. Setup done
We created the legal structure with two thoughts in mind, a) the company needs to be scaleable, for that it ideally needs to be able to raise capital, and b) it needs to stay aligned with its mission for many decades and put the quality of cryopreservations first without compromise. Organizations are usually optimized for one of those things but rarely both. Tomorrow Biostasis is focused on being scalable, with a non-profit foundation in Switzerland as an oversight body that ensures long-term alignment and stops mission drift.
2. Build a team, opened office
We opened an office in Berlin (Covid-safe usage) and started to build a team. Importantly, Fernando joined the leadership team and other important first employees came on board. Incl. freelancers and trainees we’re a team of eight. We’re very actively hiring, so more to come soon.
3. Medical team, Standby, Infrastructure for Germany
Our first medical standby infrastructure is located in Berlin, Germany, the next will either be with a partner close to Amsterdam or in Switzerland. The infrastructure allows for a fast response to biostasis cases independent of location.
Each location has a Mobile Biostasis Vehicle (MBV) that is equipped with all of the medical technology and tools that are needed to allow for full on-site cryoprotection. The MBVs are built on an ambulance platform and are retrofitted with a lot of specialized technology. We’ve started to consistently improving the technology and are training more and more people to perfect the capabilities.
4. First customers
After completing the standby infrastructure, we started to allow signups from the first customers. While it’s early, we see high interested, very promising acquisitions costs and referrals — so, we’re quite optimistic that we’re on the right track. If you’re interested in the topic and live in Germany reach out :) (or learn more first).
We also started the first marketing activities with a focus on education.
This will be one of the main priorities for 2021.
5. Completed planning and funding for facility (on EBF side)
Part of the mission is being able to fund and conduct very significant amounts of research. Towards this we’re building a research institute in Switzerland that will be one of the corner pieces to achieve this. The institute will be built and run by European Biostasis Foundation, a non-profit research foundation I co-founded in 2019. In 2020 we completed the planning phase, got the building permits and secured the funding to build it. COVID-19 made everything slower than planned but we’re on track to complete construction at the end of 2021 / first half of 2022.
6. First R&D projects
While the research institute is not completed yet, we’ve still completed the first research projects. Most of them were development focused or applied research to improve procedures and protocols and adapt them to local specificities.
We also conducted two larger sentiment studies, one in the US and one in Germany and published them in PLOS ONE. Here is a more comprehensive writeup on Medium.
R&D will become more and more a core element of what we do.
7. Get ready for funding and first checks
We raised the first checks in 2020 and did all the preparatory work to start fundraising for a larger funding round in mid 2021. We’re exclusively looking for investors with strong intrinsic motivation and alignment for the mission. As this is a unique and very high impact topic not every investors fits, in fact, (V)HNWI and family offices are best. If you know someone who is motivated by a very long term, high impact mission, I would very much appreciate an introduction. Please give me a ping.
What’s next?
2021 has three goals. a) Improve and expand the medical infrastructure, standby capabilities and training protocols to comfortably cover DACH, b) grow our membership significantly and start to build a tight community, and c) raise a significant funding round to make this all possible.
This is the first chapter in a long, long story.
I’m very much looking forward to what we will be able to achieve in 2021 and the decades ahead.
Please reach out if the topic interests you, happy to talk more.
