Jason Pontin
Palo Alto
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General Partner @DCVC. Cofounder @totustx. Chair @zwitterco+@KanvasBio. Board @ProximaBio+@DayhoffLabs+@RelationRx+@recycleye. Formerly, EIC+CEO @techreview
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Articles by Jason Pontin
Relation defines the TechBio sector with AI models transforming drug discovery
Despite the last decade’s progress toward understanding diseases, one stubborn problem persists. While technology now enables the measurement of cellular responses to different interventions, the matrix of possible interventions across proteins, contexts, and tissues is experimentally intractable. That makes biotech R&D and even clinical testing a risky, costly process of trial and error, with failure as the norm.
Kanvas makes the microbiome druggable — and the implications are massive
Ever since the genomics revolution revealed how reliant the human organism is on its microscopic microbial cohabitants, the microbiome has been medicine’s most elusive frontier, promising better health if only we could untangle the trillions of interactions that influence nearly every facet of our physiology. But until now, effective medicines that harness the microbiome have been rare.
DCVC 2026 Q 1 update
Friends of DCVC, Our portfolio companies had a busy quarter attracting major new funding (about $2 billion in aggregate), securing key commercial partnerships, and scaling fundamental technologies needed to accelerate AI, defense, energy, quantum, agriculture, medicine, and more. Behind each piece of news below is dazzling technology spun from a flywheel of proprietary data, deep compute, and insight derived from a given product’s contact with the real world.
Deep Tech Opportunity: TechBio companies are using data to rethink…
Last year’s edition of the DCVC Deep Tech Opportunities Report, released in June 2025, explains the global challenges we see as the most critical and the possible solutions we hope to advance through our investing. This is a condensed and updated version of the report’s fifth chapter.
Proxima raises $80M in seed financing, led by DCVC, to reprogram…
Proteins, carriers of the signals that can spark or stop cellular functions, seldom work alone — they’re found in complexes with other proteins. Among drug hunters there’s been a growing hope that if we could understand, control, and disrupt how proteins lock together, it might give us new ways to slow difficult-to-treat diseases like cancer or autoimmune disorders.
Noetik’s partnership with GSK puts dollar signs on the AI licensing…
Of all the TechBio companies in DCVC’s portfolio, Noetik may have the business model that leans into AI the hardest. It doesn’t yet have its own pipeline of drugs in development. Its initial focus has been entirely on building world models for biology—large generative models that can simulate patients’ cells and make predictions that inform patient treatment and support the development of new cancer therapies.
DCVC publishes the 2025 Deep Tech Opportunities Report: “An American…
Whether in times of stasis or change, our job as deep tech investors is the same: to spot skilled entrepreneurs with market-ready ideas for solving trillion-dollar problems, and help them find the capital and connections they need to move from prototype to commercial-scale deployment. Toward that end, we seek a constant understanding of the shifting needs and opportunities that deep tech investors and builders can best address.
DCVC DTOR 2024: TechBio is emerging as the data-centric, AI-native…
The 2024 edition of the DCVC Deep Tech Opportunities Report explains the guiding principles behind our investing and how our portfolio companies contribute to deep tech’s counteroffensive against climate change, disease, and the other threats to prosperity, longevity, and abundance. The report is organized into seven chapters; this is the second.
Relation Therapeutics partners with GSK in history-making…
Relation Therapeutics, a DCVC TechBio company dedicated to finding new biological targets for drugs to cure complex human diseases, has entered into a research partnership with pharmaceutical giant GSK that will lead to a new generation of drugs for fibrotic disease and osteoarthritis. Relation will receive a total upfront payment from GSK of $45 million and will be eligible to receive success-based collaboration payments of up to $63 million — totaling $108 million.
DCVC DTOR 2024: It’s time to start making AI greener
Between 2010 and 2020, the major data center operators held power requirements roughly flat through energy-efficiency improvements and renewable energy purchases. Then came AI’s great breakthrough in the form of large transformer-based “foundation models” such as GPT‑3, which entailed a shocking increase in electricity and cooling requirements.
The 19th-Century Crank Who Tried to Tell Us About the Microbiome
Science, we are told, advances one funeral at a time1, but sometimes it progresses through resurrections. The French chemist Antoine Béchamp (1816–1908) was a life-long rival to the great microbiologist Louis Pasteur. Pasteur invented pasteurization and vaccines for rabies and anthrax and discovered that many diseases are caused by invisible germs. Béchamp was a bitter crank who argued that microbes became dangerous when the health of the host—its “terrain” or environment—deteriorated.
How Equilibrium Energy is managing increasingly volatile power grids
The electrical grid is undergoing a profound transformation. As our reliance on variable renewable energy sources like wind and solar increases, and extreme weather events driven by climate change become more frequent and intense, grid operators face unprecedented challenges in maintaining stability and reliability amidst a new surge in electricity demand after being relatively constant since the 1990s.
DCVC closes $700 million+ in new funds for a healthier planet and…
In 2010, we launched DCVC with a simple mission: to support deep tech founders pushing the limits of emerging technology to solve trillion-dollar problems that matter. We committed ourselves to achieving, for our investors, venture-scale returns from companies whose success would bring humanity greater resilience, abundance, and equitability. At the time, this approach was novel in venture capital.
DCVC releases the 2024 Deep Tech Opportunities Report
DCVC is deep tech venture capital. What do we mean by that? We back entrepreneurs uniting gritty, hands-on science and engineering with emerging computational techniques to solve trillion-dollar problems in change-resistant industries. We think this is the best way for venture capitalists to counter existential threats such as climate change and push toward a future of prosperity, societal resilience and abundance, equitable opportunity, and extended lifespans and healthspans for everyone.
Twelve raises $645M to turn CO2 into sustainable jet fuel
Today, with its announcement of a massive TPG-led $645 million in new investment, Twelve has received emphatic validation for its singular approach to turning waste CO2 into products that can decarbonize entire industries. From the start, we have believed that Twelve’s groundbreaking technology may prove dispositive in the fight against climate change.
Unspun’s 3D weaving—a literal revolution for the clothing industry
What do your pants have to do with climate change? A major impediment to a zero-carbon economy is our extreme overconsumption of material goods, including how we make and distribute them — especially the clothes we all wear. Today we’re thrilled to announce that DCVC has led a big Series B investment for Unspun, which is lowering the fashion industry’s shocking levels of overproduction, textile waste, and carbon emissions.
How Noetik uses images to give its AI model a deeper understanding of…
Feed enough images of tumor slices into Noetik’s machine learning model, and it will build a powerful internal representation of cancer itself. This image from the DCVC-backed company is a composite of thousands of slices or “cores” from human lung cancer tissue, with a few healthy controls mixed in.
09.26.23 -- Using AI In Drug Discovery Isn't The Golden Solution You Think It Is — Yet
Before we realize the true potential of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to treat disease, we need to start by developing technologies that can generate the massive amounts of reliable, high-quality biological data that make up the fundamentals of any AI/ML approach.
DCVC Leads $14 Million Seed Round for Noetik
We are thrilled to announce DCVC has led a $14 million seed financing round for Noetik (and see Endpoints coverage here), a computationally driven company employing broad and novel AI to give humanity the edge in its fight against cancer. Noetik is using spatial biology and machine learning to unravel the complex circuitry of cancer, and aims to empower pharmaceutic teams to develop better cancer treatments that have a higher probability of clinical success.
08.28.23 -- AbbVie 2023 CDMO Leadership Award Interview
API supply is all about balancing risk. Preparing to ask and answer these 10 questions can provide clarity and confidence. Discover how to diversify your API supply chain. Discover how to construct an agreement between partners that favors fluid communication and alignment of business objectives — crucial for a fruitful sponsor-CDMO relationship to diminish overall risk for both.
Using AI In Drug Discovery Isn't The Golden Solution You Think It Is — Yet. Original
By Neil Dhawan and Jason Pontin, Totus Medicines Despite the massive scope and investment of the pharmaceutical industry, and tremendous breakthroughs of modern medicine, 97% of the human genome and the proteins it creates cannot be targeted with existing drugs. Because 90% of the drug targets known to be driving human disease remain undrugged, most diseases, unsurprisingly, are left untreated.
SVB Is Dead. Long Live SVB.
We all know how it began. It started on March 9, when the run on Silicon Valley Bank made the innovation economy totter and threatened a global financial crisis. It continued on March 10, when SVB failed and it became clear that anyone who hadn’t gotten their money out yet was stuck, facing payroll in just five days with no clear way to meet it.
Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) Company News & Analysis
Larry Summers has a message to all of us here in Silicon Valley: It’s time to switch up that reading list. “Perhaps pay a little more attention to history relative to science fiction in terms of understanding all the things that the future may hold,” he said during a conversation with me and The Information subscribers Tuesday. Larry Summers has a message to all of us here in Silicon Valley: It’s time to switch up that...
ZwitterCo’s chemically engineered water filtration system helps large farms and industrial processors recycle their wastewater
Wastewater reprocessing startup ZwitterCo announced on September 15 that it has raised $33 million to scale up its chemically engineered membrane water filtration technology to help industrial companies and large farms recycle wastewater. The patented filtration technology came out of a research lab at Tufts University.
This startup's chemically engineered water filtration system helps large farms and industrial processors recycle their wastewater Original
The wastewater reprocessing startup ZwitterCo has raised $33 million to scale up its chemically engineered membrane water filtration technology to help industrial companies and large farms recycle wastewater from their systems, allowing them to use less fresh water. "The goal for us is to maximize reuse, so that you can limit the amount of freshwater consumption," CEO and cofounder Alex Rappaport told CNBC in a video interview.
Against Transcendence
Science fiction is to technology as romance novels are to marriage: a form of propaganda. Both recapitulate in narrative form the fondest illusions of the practitioners of a commonplace but difficult activity, and so contrive to make the ordinary seem exhilarating. Technologists spend their days devising novel solutions to discrete problems. The problems, if not the projects with which they are associated, are often boring. But in science fiction, technologists are heroic.
How to Save Media
Even a few years ago, Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele, those 18th-century London gallants and the founders of the Spectator, would have recognized the forms and modes of business that characterized our newspapers and magazines. Not now. For 300 years, two related sources of revenues sustained publications: subscriptions and advertising. The system worked imperfectly.
A Social-Networking Service With a Velvet Rope (Published 2007)
Slipstream Alex Albrecht, left, and Kevin Rose are hosts of Diggnation, a Web show on which they discuss the news, lounge and drink beer. July 29, 2007 JUST now, the hottest startup in Silicon Valley — minutely examined by bloggers, panted after by investors — is Pownce, but only a chosen few can try out its Web site.
Why We Can’t Solve Big Problems
On July 21, 1969, Buzz Aldrin climbed gingerly out of Eagle, Apollo 11’s lunar module, and joined Neil Armstrong on the Sea of Tranquility. Looking up, he said, “Beautiful, beautiful, magnificent desolation.” They were alone; but their presence on the moon’s silent, gray surface was the culmination of a convulsive collective effort. Eight years before, President John F.
Free Speech in the Era of Its Technological Amplification
Greetings, Pale Ghost. I don’t know what news reaches you in the afterlife—whether there is a gossipy daily bulletin, the Heavenly Gazette, filled with our doings; or if new arrivals bring stories of developments on Earth; or if you still care about us at all—but much has changed since you died in 1873. Some of those changes would gratify your liberal spirit; still others, vex. A few would baffle.
Three Questions on Machine Learning in Medicine
Listen to the podcast interview with Molly Gibson and Avak Kahvejian by clicking the orange button on the player above. Avak Kahvejian, a general partner at Flagship Pioneering, and Molly Gibson, a principal at Flagship, originate companies that employ machine learning and artificial intelligence to generate new insights into the complexities of biology. Jason Pontin, a senior advisor at the enterprise, spoke to them in March. The following are highlights from that conversation.
A Conversation With Cigall Kadoch
The cofounder of Foghorn Therapeutics studies how defects in gene traffic control lead to a variety of cancers and other diseases. Listen to the podcast interview with Cigall Kadoch and Jason Pontin by clicking the orange button on the player above. Cigall Kadoch, the cofounder of Foghorn Therapeutics, is one of the stars of Flagship’s ecosystem.
How Authors Write
Early in Nicholson Baker’s slim first novel, The Mezzanine (1988), whose entire action takes place during an escalator ride at lunchtime, the narrator describes buying milk and a cookie, and then pauses to consider, in a page-long footnote, the “uncomfortable era of the floating drinking straw”: This story is part of our November/December 2012 issue See the rest of the issue Subscribe I stared in disbelief the first time a straw rose up from my can of soda and hung out over the table, barely...
Why Publishers Don't Like Apps
By the time Apple released the iPad in April of 2010, only four months after Steve Jobs first announced his “magical and revolutionary” new machines, traditional publishers were gripped by a collective delusion. They had convinced themselves that tablet computers and smart phones would allow them to unwind their unhappy histories with the Internet.
More Trouble with Programming
The first part of this interview engendered such debate in the comments section of our site, as well as on aggregator sites like Slashdot, that Technology Review chose to address some of the objections to C++ raised by readers. Technology Review: Name the coolest and lamest programs ever written in C++, and say what worked and didn’t work. Bjarne Stroustrup: Google! Can you even remember the world before Google?
“Brittle, Greedy, Opaque, and Shallow”: The Promise and Limits of Today’s Artificial Intelligence
Illustration of a 3-D neural network with six layers by Andrii Shyp via iStock A Conversation with Rodney Brooks and Gary Marcus Rod Brooks and Gary Marcus are, simultaneously, two of the progenitors of modern artificial intelligence and robotics and also among their fields’ most persistent critics.
The Problem with Programming
In the 1980s and 90s, Bjarne Stroustrup designed and implemented the C++ programming language, which popularized object-oriented programming and influenced numerous other programming languages, including Java. C++ remains the archetypal “high level” computer language (that is, one that preserves the features of natural, human language), and it is still used by millions of programmers. Many of the systems and applications of the PC and Internet eras were written in C++.
Will the World Run Out of Food? A Conversation with Robert Berendes
Image credit: "Spring Turning" by Grant Wood, 1936, oil on Masonite via Creative Commons Today, the planet produces enough calories for every person on the planet to eat a steady diet, though social and political issues make distribution uneven. That caloric output, however, has come at a cost to both farmland and the larger environment.
Are Humans Fit for Space? A ‘Herculean’ Study Says Maybe Not
Here’s how you test your intracranial pressure in space. First, you collect baseline samples of your blood, saliva, and urine, and take ultrasound images of the vessels in your heart, neck, head, and eyes, lining up the scanning device on black dots tattooed on your body before you left Earth. Then, you clamber into the Chibis, Russian for “lapwing,” a pair of hard, corrugated-rubber pants whose waist can be sealed.
Al Gore Did Not Invent the Green New Deal, but He Likes It
I met Al Gore when I interviewed him for Red Herring magazine during his run for the presidency 20 years ago. I remember thinking I’d never met a politician so intellectually curious and so uncomfortable with campaigning. (Red Herring’s archives are long gone, but The Weekly Standard’s derisive summary of our conversation still exists.) The then-vice president was genuinely interested in technology: At one point, he spun an elaborate metaphor, likening American democracy to a microprocessor.
Against Transcendence
Letter from the Editor When technology appropriates the transcendental it becomes science fiction. This letter appeared in the February 2005 issue. by Jason Pontin February 1, 2005 Science fiction is to technology as romance novels are to marriage: a form of propaganda. Both recapitulate in narrative form the fondest illusions of the practitioners of a commonplace but difficult activity, and so contrive to make the ordinary seem exhilarating.
The Promise-and Heartbreak-of Cancer Genomics
You were a New York artist, Iowa-bred, with a narrow and idiosyncratic range of subjects. You painted bulldogs and cheerleaders, truck stops and mammoth-hunting cavemen. For two decades you inhabited a drowning world, which you nostalgized even as it vanished beneath a tidal swell of money. Its borders were 14th to Canal Street and Broadway to the East River; its capital was the Mars Bar. You were the first to help a friend and last to leave the party, and beloved by your fellow strivers.
Jason Pontin | WIRED
about Jason Pontin (@jason_pontin) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED. He is a senior partner at Flagship Pioneering, a firm in Boston that creates, builds, and funds companies that solve problems in health, food, and sustainability. From 2004 to 2017, he was the editor in chief and publisher of MIT Technology Review. Before that he was the editor of Red Herring, a business magazine that was popular during the dot-com boom.
To Curb Fake News and Hate, We Need a Little Less Speech
Social media are doomsday machines. They distract, divide, and madden; we can no longer hear each other, speak coherently, or even think. As a result, our social, civic, and political ligands are dissolving. Everywhere, people consult their screens to affirm what they already think and repeat what like-minded people have already said. They submit to surveillance and welcome algorithmic manipulation. Believing absurdities, they commit injustices. A few lose their minds altogether.
Three Commandments for Technology Optimists
More religiously, while I recognize that technological solutions create new problems, I have faith those problems will find yet more solutions, in an ascending spiral of frustration and release—the greatest show on Earth that will never end, until we do. I’m not an absolute fool about technology: a determinist or militant naif .
To Combat Climate Change, We Gotta Get a Better Battery. But How?
“It will not be easy. It will not be immediate. But it must be done.” With that imperative, Governor Jerry Brown signed a law that required California to obtain all of its electricity from sources like solar, wind, and hydropower by 2045. It was an admirably ambitious goal, commensurate to the civilizational challenge of reducing the carbon emissions responsible for climate change. The only difficulty was that neither Brown nor any anyone else knew how to do it.
The Genetics (and Ethics) of Making Humans Fit for Mars
In May of 1969, Apollo 10 flew at 25,000 miles per hour. Two months later, the crew of Apollo 11 walked on the moon. Since then, no one has flown so fast nor walked so high. NASA is now preparing for a human mission to Mars, but if our descendants ever shrug off their terrestrial bonds, it won’t be Homo sapiens who leaves, but another, more intelligently designed species. We’re not fit.
3-D Printing Is the Future of Factories (for Real This Time)
Factories, the chief innovation of the industrial revolution, are cathedrals of productivity, built to shelter specialized processes and enforce the division of labor. Adam Smith, who illuminated their function on the first page of The Wealth of Nations, offered the celebrated example of a pin factory: "I have a seen a small manufactory... where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations.
Oppenheimer's Ghost
In a 1965 documentary, The Decision to Drop the Bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had been the scientific director of the American effort to build an atomic bomb during World War II, described his emotions on witnessing the first nuclear detonation. He said, “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita.
35 Innovators Under the Age of 35
Since 1999, Technology Review has selected 35 exceptionally talented young innovators whose work we, their peers, and a distinguished panel of judges have agreed has the greatest potential to transform the world. The list has become an important recognition among technologists at startups, in industry, and in the academy, and we take seriously the responsibility of choosing the winners. We seek nominations more than six months before we publish the final list.
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