The Foundations of Tomorrow

A message from our founder

A critical gap exists between how capital is allocated and what actually drives human progress. Transformative work in fields like longevity, neuroscience, and AI safety often languishes due to a lack of funding. This shortage exists largely because there are too few patient, well-capitalized investors actively scouting the breakthroughs emerging from top US research institutions.

Over the past several years, our team has consulted with hundreds of leading scientists to identify the most transformative ideas in their fields. Often, these high-impact concepts fall outside the scope of R01 federal grants and therefore remain unrealized. We are dedicated to sponsoring and accelerating these overlooked breakthroughs, and we are incredibly proud of the pioneering teams we have backed so far. By sharing our work, we hope to inspire others to join us in tackling these civilizational challenges.

We take an unconventional approach that blends philanthropy with venture capital. By operating at the earliest stages of development, we act as a bridge across the “valley of death” that separates academic research from commercial venture funding. To date, we have deployed nearly $100M in philanthropic grants and $250M+ in early-stage investments through the Amaranth Foundation and Starbloom Capital.

The brain as the crux for AGI safety and longevity

Our top priorities are ensuring a safe transition to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and extending the human lifespan so as many people as possible can participate in the next phase of civilization.

We’ve converged on neuroscience as a primary focus because the brain is both the only relatively safe general intelligence that we know of and the most vital organ for longevity. As AI becomes more capable, we believe it is essential to study the brain to understand:

• Prosocial Behavior: The neural mechanisms behind traits like empathy, maternal instincts, and moral reasoning to build more robust moral agents

• Biological Network Architecture: Biological neural networks exhibit modularity, hierarchy, and sparse coding that may guide the design of AI systems that are more amenable to interpretation and control

No matter how AGI emerges, understanding human intelligence remains essential. It is both the alignment target and the only known example of a general intelligence that is broadly cooperative.

We care about longevity because aging is the top cause of death and suffering in the world. 50 million deaths per year are from age-related disease. By 2029, the U.S. will spend $3T+ annually on adults 65 and older. Research into the underlying biology of aging remains drastically underfunded relative to the scale of the problem.

Our existing portfolio

I believe the endeavors we are funding today will become some of the most important platforms of tomorrow. We will go into more detail on the areas we care about in subsequent posts, but here’s some of what we’ve funded:

• Bexorg, a next-generation platform dramatically improving brain drug development

• Cognito Therapeutics, a promising progression-halting therapy for Alzheimer’s Disease and potentially Parkinson’s

• The Enigma Project → Metamorphic, a Stanford project to build comprehensive models of brain structure and neural firing that led to a company scaling these models for better, safer AI

• Neuropixels, advancing the leading neural probe for large-scale recordings of individual neurons

• Becoming, engineering replacement tissues — and eventually organs — at scale

• Loyal, bringing the first FDA-approved longevity drug to market — starting with dogs

• Magic Lifescience, a lab-on-chip platform to cheaply and accurately detect pathogens and biomarkers in any biofluid

• Swift Solar, low-cost perovskite solar cells that are 40%+ more efficient than silicon cells

• Etherealize, building the settlement rails for Wall Street on Ethereum

• Forest Neurotech → Merge, a non-profit de-risking ultrasound neuromodulation technology that led to a company developing an ultrasound BCI

• E11 Bio, technology to map brain wiring at 100x lower cost

Brain maps built with E11 Bio’s ExM barcoding technology

Building roadmaps to the future

If you want a bird’s eye view of the fields we care about, we’ve openly written comprehensive field maps to help you make sense of them. These maps guide our own allocation decisions and have been widely acclaimed and referenced in their fields:

• Bottlenecks of Aging (2022): Our advisory board helped identify 12 key constraints slowing progress in extending healthy lifespan, from regulatory reform to brain aging research and talent development

• Brain Aging White Paper (2023): We gathered some of the top minds in neuroscience to outline their top moonshot ideas for combating brain aging

• NeuroAI for AI Safety Roadmap (2024): A 152-page technical document identifying 8 paths where neuroscience can inform safer AI development, synthesizing over 700 references and coordinating input from researchers across multiple institutions

• Silver Linings (2025): An interactive economic model quantifying the ROI of longevity breakthroughs, allowing users to simulate impacts on GDP and aging trajectories

We’re currently concentrating our efforts on neuroAI and AI safety, decoding intelligence to ensure its safe and aligned development. If you’re building in this direction, we’d like to hear from you.

Email us at: info@amaranth.foundation