versant-ventures
(7)
Tony Kingsley
Tony Kingsley is a biopharmaceutical executive who runs Stablix, Inc., a New York biotech betting that you can treat disease by protecting proteins instead of destroying them. He took the CEO seat in February 2022 after a career of running one drug company after another - Scholar Rock, TARIS Bio, The Medicines Company - and heading global commercial at Biogen, with a McKinsey partnership and a stint in medical devices before that. In July 2025 he joined the board of Indivior. He holds a Dartmouth degree and a Harvard MBA.
Helicore Biopharma
Helicore Biopharma is a South San Francisco clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company building first-in-class GIP (glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide) antagonists for obesity and cardiometabolic disease. Its lead candidate, HCR-188, is a humanized monoclonal antibody that binds circulating GIP ligand rather than the GIP receptor, a mechanism designed to improve the quality of weight loss - favoring fat loss over lean mass when paired with GLP-1 - and to restore leptin sensitivity. Incubated by Versant Ventures, the company emerged from stealth in January 2025 with a $65 million Series A and is advancing a pipeline of long-acting antibody-peptide conjugates aimed at quarterly dosing.
Light Horse Therapeutics
Light Horse Therapeutics is a San Diego biotech founded in 2023 that flips traditional drug discovery on its head. Using a proprietary 'function-first' platform that pairs systematic CRISPR-based gene editing with chemical biology, the company first pinpoints which exact regions of a disease-driving protein are functionally critical, then hunts for small molecules that hit those precise sites. Launched out of Versant Ventures' Inception Discovery Engine with a $62M Series A and a Novartis collaboration worth up to $1 billion in milestones, Light Horse is targeting some of oncology's toughest, historically 'undruggable' proteins.
Darrin Miles
Darrin Miles is the President and CEO of Nested Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts precision oncology company that launched in 2022 with $125 million in financing to hunt for cancer-driving mutations hiding in plain sight. A commercialization leader with more than two decades in healthcare, Miles spent 14 years at Genentech shepherding landmark cancer brands and later served as Chief Commercial Officer at Agios Pharmaceuticals, where he helped bring the first mutant-IDH therapies to acute myeloid leukemia patients. At Nested, he is translating computational biophysics, genomics, and chemical biology into drugs aimed at targets the rest of the field calls undruggable.
Markus Renschler
Markus Renschler is a medical oncologist turned biotech operator who runs Light Horse Therapeutics, a San Diego small-molecule drug discovery company that launched in January 2025 with a $62 million Series A and a Novartis deal worth up to $1 billion. He spent 25 years moving cancer drugs from the lab bench to the pharmacy counter, helped register blockbuster therapies in breast, lung and pancreatic cancer at Celgene and Pharmion, and previously took Cyteir Therapeutics from a discovery-stage startup to a publicly traded company. He trained at Princeton and Stanford and once built patient-specific lymphoma vaccines in Ron Levy's lab.
Beckie Robertson
Beckie Robertson is co-founder and general partner at Versant Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm focused on biotechnology and drug discovery. A chemical engineer by training, she has spent decades backing early-stage medical device and diagnostics companies, with prior operating roles at Chiron Diagnostics, Lifescan, and Egis. She currently serves as vice chair of the Cornell Board of Trustees and was awarded the Cornell Duffield Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award in April 2026.
Mike Rosenbluth
Mike Rosenbluth is the Founder and CEO of Swing Therapeutics, the San Francisco-based company behind Stanza - the first FDA-authorized prescription digital therapeutic for fibromyalgia symptoms. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer with a UC Berkeley PhD in Bioengineering, Rosenbluth spent years at McKinsey, a VC firm (Versant Ventures), and cancer diagnostics company Veracyte before founding Swing in 2019. His company's landmark PROSPER-FM Phase 3 trial results were published in The Lancet in 2024, and Swing has raised over $30 million to bring evidence-based, non-drug behavioral therapy to the estimated 4 million Americans with fibromyalgia.