Breakout Ventures Closes $114M Fund III, Betting AI and Biology Are Now One and the Same

In a move that signals the accelerating convergence of artificial intelligence and life sciences, San Francisco-based venture firm Breakout Ventures has closed its third fund at $114 million—its largest to date. The firm, which began as an experimental grant program under the Thiel Foundation, is now doubling down on a thesis that has quietly become one of the most consequential in modern venture capital: the most transformative companies of the next decade will be built at the intersection of AI and biology.

Founded in 2011 by Lindy Fishburne as Breakout Labs, the initiative was designed to fund scientist-entrepreneurs working on ideas too speculative for traditional venture capital but too commercially oriented for academia. By 2017, it was clear some of these companies needed more than grants, and Breakout Ventures was born with a $60 million fund. In 2021, the firm raised $112.5 million. Now, with Fund III, it has crossed the $230 million AUM threshold.

But this isn’t just another AI fund. Breakout’s interpretation of “AI-focused” is surgical: it’s not about chatbots or productivity tools. It’s about systems that can genuinely accelerate the translation of science into medicine—drug discovery, diagnostics, neurotechnology, and materials. In other words, AI that doesn’t just assist science but becomes science.

The portfolio reflects this conviction. Noetik, a Breakout-backed biotech, is using self-supervised machine learning on spatial multimodal tumor data to discover cancer immunotherapies. It raised a $40 million Series A in 2024 led by Polaris Partners. Phantom Neuro, another portfolio company, is building neural signal processing tech to give prosthetic limb users intuitive control—a $19 million Series A in 2025 was led by Ottobock, the German prosthetics giant. ZymoChem, backed by Breakout in a $21 million Series A in 2024, is using engineered enzymes to manufacture bio-based chemicals that can compete with petroleum on cost.

Even the exits validate the thesis: Surf Bio was acquired by Halozyme for $400 million in 2025.

What unites these companies isn’t a therapeutic area or a technology stack. It’s a founder profile: scientists who think like engineers, who build fast, and who understand that in the age of AI, the commercial moat is the science itself.

Fishburne has been consistent on this for 15 years. What looked radical in 2011—AI reshaping biology—now looks inevitable. AlphaFold changed protein structure prediction forever. Foundation models are being trained on genomics, proteomics, and spatial omics data. A new generation of companies is building at that frontier with tools that didn’t exist a decade ago, compressing timelines in ways the industry is still absorbing.

Fund III will deploy capital at pre-seed through Series A, continuing Breakout’s pattern of writing the first institutional check into science-driven companies, then following on as they scale. The sectors remain consistent: biotech and life sciences, healthcare and digital health, robotics and automation, and developer tools and infrastructure—the enabling layer of computation the rest of the portfolio depends on.

For a firm that began as a grant program for ideas too speculative to attract investment, $114 million represents a very particular kind of vindication. The science Breakout backed in 2011 and 2012 looked radical then. Most of it looks inevitable now.

Tags: AI in biotech, Breakout Ventures, Lindy Fishburne, AI drug discovery, neurotechnology, biotech venture capital, Thiel Foundation, Breakout Labs, Noetik, Phantom Neuro, ZymoChem, AlphaFold, spatial omics, cancer immunotherapy, prosthetics, bio-based chemicals, Halozyme acquisition, science-driven startups, pre-seed biotech, Series A biotech, AI-native biotech, neural signal processing, enzyme engineering, computational biology, life sciences venture, developer tools for science, robotics in healthcare, digital health AI, biotech exits, venture fund III, AI and biology convergence

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