Steve Jobs’ son raises $200 million end cancer deaths

Reed Jobs, the son of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, says he believes most cancers can be transformed from fatal diagnoses into manageable, chronic diseases within his lifetime — and plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to back that belief.

Jobs’ venture capital firm, Yosemite, has raised more than $200 million for its second fund and hopes to raise $150 million more, Forbes reported Friday. 

The fund is backed by several major investors, including biotech giant Amgen, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, MIT and venture capitalist John Doerr. After the recent funding round, Yosemite now manages more than $1 billion in assets, including money it oversees for hospitals, endowments and foundations, Forbes reported.

“We think it’s going to go from a death sentence to just a chronic lifelong disease,” Jobs, 34, told Forbes. “I think it’s doable in the timeframe of my lifetime for most cancers.”

Reed Jobs was 12 years old when his father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest forms of the disease. Eight years later, in 2011, his father died at age 56.

As a teenager, Reed Jobs worked in cancer labs at Stanford University and began college there as a pre-med student. 

After his father’s death, he switched majors to history before eventually returning to health care through Emerson Collective, the impact investing and philanthropic organization founded by his mother, Laurene Powell Jobs. There, he led the organization’s cancer-focused health strategy.

In 2023, Jobs spun out Yosemite as an independent firm. The venture capital fund invests across a range of cancer-related approaches, including gene therapy, immunotherapy, artificial intelligence-driven drug discovery and earlier cancer detection.

“I had never ever wanted to be a venture capitalist,” he told the New York Times in 2023. “But I realized that when you’re actually incubating something and putting it together, you can make a tremendous difference in what assets are part of that, what direction it’s going to take, and what the scientific focus is going to be.”

Yosemite is currently invested in about 20 companies, including Tune Therapeutics, Azalea Therapeutics and Chai Discovery, according to its website.

Jobs said the new fund is expected to invest in about 25 companies, with a continued emphasis on gene therapy, cancer vaccines, radiopharmaceuticals and the use of artificial intelligence to speed drug development.

“These are all really long timelines,” Jobs said, “but these are all coming to fruition at the same time.”