R eed Jobs was 12 when his father, Apple founder Steve Jobs, received a harrowing diagnosis: pancreatic cancer. He died eight years later at age 56.
That tragedy led the younger Jobs to become an investor funding companies focused on preventing people from dying of cancer, which currently kills more than 600,000 a year in the United States alone.
“We think it’s going to go from a death sentence to just a chronic lifelong disease,” Jobs told Forbes. “I think it’s doable in the timeframe of my lifetime for most cancers.”
Jobs began investing in health companies at Emerson Collective, the impact investment and philanthropy group founded by his mother Laurene Powell Jobs (Forbes estimates her net worth at $13.5 billion). Then, in 2023, he spun out his own firm, called Yosemite for the national park where his parents got married, raising a first fund of $263 million. Yosemite is now invested in some 20 companies, including gene therapy firm Tune Therapeutics and AI drug development startup Chai Discovery.
Today, Yosemite said that it had raised more than $200 million for a second fund that has a total targeted size of $350 million, with heavy-hitter investors that include biotech giant Amgen, Memorial Sloan Kettering, MIT and venture capitalist John Doerr. Powell Jobs invested in the fund through Emerson; as a general partner, Jobs is also personally invested.
Yosemite focuses on the whole gamut of cancers, from colon cancer, which is often caught early and is treatable, to pancreatic cancer, which is largely a death sentence. Jobs is looking at companies building a broad range of solutions. “There’s such variety that some low-mutation, aggressive cancers are still going to be a big problem probably 10 years from now,” Jobs said. “But the vast majority we think are just going to be needing early detection, better targeted therapies and continuous monitoring. That’s going to continue to drive down mortality.”
“We think it’s going to go from a death sentence to just a chronic lifelong disease. I think it’s doable in the timeframe of my lifetime for most cancers.”
The firm manages more than $1 billion in assets, including those it handles for endowments, hospitals and foundations, making it a minnow in a sea of venture capital giants. But it’s rapidly become an important player in healthcare and especially oncology, a particularly complex area where investments can take many years to pay off. It also has a certain, uh, clout, given his last name.
“I think Reed is motivated by many, many different things from most normal venture capitalists,” said John McHutchison, CEO of Tune Therapeutics, which is working on a therapy for hepatitis B, which affects more than 250 million people worldwide and is a leading cause of liver cancer. “He wants to do big things and be impactful.” Tune recently raised $175 million, and Jobs has been involved since his time at Emerson.
Like many people whose lives are upended by cancer, Jobs, now 34, couldn’t stop thinking about the disease after his father was diagnosed. He did summer internships in Stanford’s cancer labs as a teenager, and started college there as a pre-med student. But after his dad’s death, he needed a break, so he switched majors to history, eventually getting a master’s degree in the subject with a focus on nuclear weapons strategy.
But the potential for making a difference in cancer research and treatment drew him back. He joined Emerson at 24, taking charge of a new healthcare strategy with a focus on oncology, that spanned both investing and philanthropy. His goal was to do something about the so-called “Valley of Death,” the time period between when scientists make a discovery and when investors have seen enough clinical data to want to put money behind a breakthrough.
“I think Reed is motivated by many, many different things from most normal venture capitalists.”
While Yosemite is a VC firm, it’s an unusual one. Jobs also gives no strings attached grants to scientists. That gives the firm an advantage when those researchers are ready to raise funds to commercialize their breakthrough discoveries. Plus, Jobs believes the combination of grants and investment is especially important at a time when the federal government is cutting support for science.
“We have to step up, for our researchers and just for the state of science in America right now, which is of course in a tenuous position, and people like us have more of a responsibility to act than ever before,” Jobs said. “We feel a greater sense of urgency.”
Azalea Therapeutics, which spun out of Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna’s lab at UC Berkeley, received some of those early-stage grants. Its research is focused on a type of gene therapy where doctors don’t need to take a patient’s cells out to reengineer them. Instead, that happens within the person’s body, what’s called “in vivo.” “What’s really unique about them [Yosemite] is this link back to the academic labs,” said Azalea cofounder and CEO Jenny Hamilton. “Very early on they saw the promise that if this high-risk research worked it could be transformative.” When Azalea came out of stealth this past November with $82 million in total funding, Yosemite was a key investor. Jobs is now a board observer.
Another investment typical of his approach is Chai Discovery, a buzzy company founded in 2024 that’s using AI to design proteins that could create new drugs. That firm’s models are being used to tackle certain types of cancers and other diseases that were historically thought to be hard to treat, or even “undruggable.” In December, the startup raised $130 million led by General Catalyst at a $1.3 billion valuation, and in January it announced a partnership with Eli Lilly to develop new medicines. “I think Chai Discovery is going to be one of the more important companies of this decade, actually,” Jobs said.
“We have to step up, for our researchers and just for the state of science in America right now.”
All of these companies are indicative of just how far cancer treatment has come in the past 15 years. Merck’s blockbuster drug Keytruda, an early immunotherapy that treats lung cancer and melanoma, among others, has $30 billion in annual sales. Then there’s advanced treatments like CAR-T cell therapy, a personalized form of immunotherapy that trains a person’s own immune cells to recognize and destroy cancer. Now there’s a whole universe of immunotherapy and new forms of gene therapy, opening up the potential for new companies based on cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs. “These are all really long timelines, but these are all coming to fruition at the same time,” Jobs said.
Rachna Khosla, senior vice president of business development at Amgen, told Forbes by email its investment in Yosemite’s new fund–its first in the firm–was “a natural fit” because of the two firms’ shared commitment to fighting cancer. “Their hybrid model…supports breakthrough science at its earliest and most fragile stage,” she added.
Jobs figures that the new fund will invest in some 25 companies. While he won’t name names yet, he said that there are “several incubations that we’re getting launched right now” including in radiopharmaceuticals, special targeted radioactive drugs that are increasingly seen as a key tool in fighting cancer. He also sees enormous potential in companies that are using AI in both drug discovery (like Chai) and to make healthcare operate more efficiently (like Sage Care, which is creating an air traffic control system for healthcare).
Gene therapy is a special focus. “We believe that we’re actually in the springtime of gene therapy,” he said, pointing to the range of therapies represented by Tune and Azalea. “And we think that the companies that are just beginning to be in the clinic now are going to be the first of a whole new class.”
And finally, Jobs sees “unbelievable potential” for cancer vaccines, which could both protect someone from getting cancer in the first place, and, more immediately, help jumpstart the immune system of someone who already has it. “It’s another way to really go at cancer at the root, which I think we haven’t really gotten enough out of yet,” he said. “A lot of the mRNA research cuts have also affected research for potential cancer vaccines. I don’t know why anyone would want to cut that.”