The drug-discovery company that treats evolution as a 100-million-year clinical trial - and reads the survivors' genomes for cures.
A logo, a squirrel, and a very large idea: that the animals which survive freezing, starving and hibernating already carry the answers we spend billions searching for. This is what that bet looks like on paper.
Here is a fact that should bother the pharmaceutical industry more than it does: every winter, a 13-lined ground squirrel drops its heart rate to a few beats per minute, chills to near-freezing, stops eating, and then wakes up in spring with no organ damage, no blood clots, and no muscle wasting. A human who tried this would not survive the afternoon. The squirrel does it annually, on schedule, for free.
Fauna Bio's argument is that this is not a curiosity. It is data. Evolution, the company likes to point out, is the most rigorous drug-discovery process that has ever existed - billions of organisms, stress-tested over eons by conditions that would kill most species, with the survivors carrying the molecular receipts. The winners of that process are walking around (and hibernating, and diving, and overeating) with genetic solutions to problems that pharma spends fortunes chasing.
Most biotech starts with a broken human and works backwards toward a mechanism. Fauna Bio starts at the other end - with a healthy animal that, by all rights, should be broken. A bear that triples its body fat before winter without becoming diabetic. A seal that holds its breath for an hour. A squirrel whose heart shrugs off the cold. The company asks a single, stubborn question of each of them: what protects you, and can we switch it on in people?
Answering that at scale is the hard part, and it is where the AI comes in. Fauna Bio built a proprietary biobank of tissue from "extreme mammals," then layered on a comparative-genomics platform - named Convergence - that reads across hundreds of species looking for adaptations that evolved independently more than once. When unrelated animals arrive at the same molecular solution, that is evolution effectively voting twice, and it is a strong signal that a target matters.
It is an unusual company built by an unusual team, and it has managed to turn a genuinely strange premise - that squirrels and bears belong in a drug pipeline - into a candidate molecule, a set of internal programs, and a partnership with one of the largest drugmakers on earth. The rest of this dossier is the how.
“An AI-driven drug discovery company leveraging data from 100 million years of evolved disease resistance in mammals.”
Fauna Bio, in its own wordsThe core engine. It integrates large-scale, cross-species omics data from hundreds of animals to find and validate novel human drug targets - looking specifically for adaptations that evolution arrived at more than once.
A multi-agent AI layer that automates target discovery. It draws on genomic data from 290+ species and can identify, rank, and generate concept sheets for drug targets in minutes rather than months.
The first internal drug candidate - an oral small molecule for HFpEF heart failure, traced back to the cardiac-protection genes of hibernating ground squirrels. Nominated January 2025.
Underneath the software sits the thing competitors can't easily copy: a proprietary collection of tissue and multi-omic data from species that resist cold, starvation, oxygen deprivation, and radiation. The moat isn't the model - it's the biology no one else bothered to collect.
Field notes: the squirrel keeps its heart healthy through the cold. The spiny mouse regenerates tissue. The seal manages oxygen like few animals alive. Each is a different chapter of the same question.
A board-certified avian (bird) veterinarian who also earned a PhD in cancer biology at Stanford. The unlikely path from bird medicine to techbio is, in a sense, the whole company: pay attention to the animals everyone else ignores.
A specialist in the molecular genetics of hibernation with a PhD in human medical genetics. She brings the deep biology of how animals power down and recover without harm - the science at the heart of the pipeline.
A Harvard-trained computational biologist and comparative-genomics expert, formerly of the Broad Institute. She builds the engine that turns cross-species genomes into ranked, testable drug targets.
The three met at Stanford. None of them come from the same discipline - a veterinarian, a hibernation geneticist, and a genomics engineer - which is precisely the point. The whole company lives in the gap between fields that don't normally overlap.
Bars are scaled to the Lilly deal ceiling to show the leverage of a platform business: a modest raise, a very large potential partnership.
Led by LifeForce Capital, with participation from True Ventures, Boom Capital, Pacific 8 Ventures, BioMed Ventures, Vibe Capital, and Arcadia Science.
Fauna monetizes two ways: advancing its own internal drug pipeline, and licensing its AI to big pharma for upfront payments, equity, milestones, and royalties. The Lilly deal is the template.
In December 2023, Eli Lilly agreed to pay Fauna Bio up to $494 million in milestones - plus an upfront payment, equity, and royalties - to point the Convergence platform at obesity. By early 2024, Fauna had already designated its first metabolic-disease target.
The deal that put a squirrel in an obesity pipelineZehnder, Grabek, and Goodman launch Fauna Bio in the San Francisco Bay Area on a single premise: mine evolved disease resistance for human medicine.
Raises $9M to expand its comparative-genomics platform for novel target discovery.
Announces a strategic collaboration with Eli Lilly to discover novel obesity targets, worth up to $494 million.
Designates its first metabolic-disease drug target under the Lilly partnership, drawing on hibernating-mammal biology.
Nominates Faun1083, an oral small molecule for HFpEF heart failure inspired by the ground squirrel's heart.
Launches its multi-agent AI platform, integrating 290+ animal genomes to automate and speed up target discovery.
The same biology that lets a bear hibernate might one day help a human survive long-duration spaceflight. Through NASA-linked research, Fauna Bio studies torpor and radiation resistance - the pipeline's most speculative chapter, and a reminder that the company's premise scales in odd directions.
Note: video links point to public search results, since a single canonical demo URL isn't confirmed here.