ZAKA VC, a venture capital family office that supports early-stage tech startups, recently invested in a New York-based biotechnology company, Lime Therapeutics. The startup is working on a new class of lipid-targeting medicines to fight cancer, cardiometabolic diseases, and neurodegenerative disorders.
- ZAKA VC was founded in 2019 by Jan Kasper and Peter Zalesak. Being launched in Prague, it is now also operating from London and Bratislava.
- Right now, in ZAKA’s portfolio, there are 50 startups in 23 countries. The fund’s investment strategy is to back pre-seed and seed startups across Europe. What differentiates the fund from the other ones is that it helps not only with financing but also with public relations, as well as provides market research and advisory services.
- One of the fund’s recent investments is Lime Therapeutics, which was created in 2021 by Shardule Shah, Prakrit Jena, and Dan Heller. This biotech company is focused on making new types of drugs to help people modulate aberrant lipid metabolism, the process of synthesizing, breaking down, and storing fat in cells for energy storage.
- ZAKA VC has shared with Vestbee that Lime Therapeutics stands out from others due to its rapidly deployable and scalable LipidSenseTM technology, created by Prakrit Jena. With this technology, Lime Therapeutics takes first place in revealing druggable biology mediated by lipids, an area that has been ignored for a long time in spite of its importance to human wellbeing.
"The team is building a groundbreaking science platform which is able to detect and target lipid accumulation non-invasively and efficiently. We, as well as the experts in our network, were impressed by their speed of movement as well as their ability to utilize data and target conditions such as cancer, metabolic disorders, and neurodegenerative diseases," shared the managing partner of ZAKA VC, Jan Kasper.
- According to the startup, LipidSenseTM is working 20,000 times faster than the current standard and can speed up the pace of lipidomics research as well as enable the identification of potential new drugs that can transform lipid biology.
Who are the investors
- Apart from ZAKA VC, Jolt VC, a French private equity firm that specializes in technology, and Inaki Berenguer, an angel investor and managing director of Life X Ventures, the US investing company, also supported Lime Therapeutics.
