Novogaia

Who owns Novogaia?

Novogaia is currently owned by BACKED VC through Backed Fund III (2025 vintage), since 2026.

Hand-verified · updated 2026-05-27

About Novogaia

Novogaia is a US biotechnology company, based in San Francisco, that applies artificial intelligence to discover new medicines from fungal chemistry, decoding the molecular structures of natural compounds that have long been out of reach for conventional drug discovery. Its core technology is Gaia-01, a transformer-based foundation model that predicts molecular structures directly from mass spectrometry data, which the company describes as lifting structure-prediction accuracy from roughly 4 percent to about 41 percent and mapping fungal metabolites to validated therapeutic targets, with an early focus on innate immunity. The company positions itself at the intersection of metabologenomics, machine learning and natural-product pharmacology, aiming to turn previously unreadable biological chemistry into validated drug candidates. It remains an early-stage, pre-revenue venture running a small research team, described in early 2026 as around four people operating with startup-scale computing resources.

Ownership journey

Novogaia was founded in 2024 by Tess Bevers, its chief executive, together with David Kubanek, and was incubated through the Entrepreneurs First talent-investor programme, which provided its earliest backing. The company subsequently raised seed capital from a syndicate that included Backed VC, Entrepreneurs First and Transpose Platform Management, positioning it within the emerging AI-native therapeutics field. Backed VC anchors the timeline as the current venture backer, investing from its third fund, Backed 3, which closed at its 100 million dollar cap in late 2025 and targets AI-native therapeutics, blockchain and banking infrastructure, and manufacturing automation. Backed remains an active shareholder from 2026, and no exit or secondary transaction has been recorded.

Under PE ownership

Since the venture backing, Novogaia has moved from a research concept to a working platform, publicly introducing its Gaia-01 foundation model in October 2025. The capital and support have funded the small team, the compute required to train its transformer architecture, and the shift toward validated therapeutic output rather than pure model development. The company has since set out plans for a successor model, Gaia-02, alongside generating validated drug candidates and building lab-in-the-loop processes in which experimental feedback continuously retrains the model. Consistent with its early stage, progress to date is measured in model performance and pipeline development rather than commercial revenue.