Welcome Shelby
Today we’re excited to announce Shelby Newsad has joined Compound as an Investor with a focus on Biology and Healthcare.
Throughout the history of Compound, we have spent a lot of time investing within the broader categories of healthcare and bio (a continuum that we think converges more and more over time).
We began with early investments on the digital health side in companies like Talkspace, continued as connected care models enabled venture-scale economics and dominant outcomes for women’s health in Tia, and expanded as we saw biotech companies begin to bridge into areas we know quite well like machine learning and robotics in companies like Clear Genetics (acquired by Invitae), Juvena Therapeutics, Pear Bio, Conception, Culture Biosciences, and more.
As our research areas and adjacent theses continued to expand, it became clear to us that bio is one of the most asymmetric upside opportunities for our style of investing moving forward. Because of that, we knew we needed to add more expertise and bandwidth to compliment our team’s approach of thesis-driven, research-centric investing.
Shelby fills that role perfectly with an undergraduate in Biochemistry with an engineering minor, an MPhil in Bioscience Enterprise and a PhD in Plant Sciences from University of Cambridge (currently awaiting her oral defense). Her research experience spans neuroscience (Serpe Lab, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland), drug discovery (Titz Lab, Helmholtz Institute, Saarbrücken, Germany) and her recent PhD project in microalgae symbioses in the Plant Sciences Department (Smith Lab, University of Cambridge, UK). Through her interest in science translation, she has interned with Merck KGaA at the Innovation Center in Germany and worked with European VC funds, such as Hummingbird Ventures, Ahren Innovation Capital, and Start Codon.
In addition to her impressive resume, as the entire team got to know Shelby, we all were blown away by her high EQ, intellectual curiosity across a wide range of subjects, and a repeatedly displayed passion for helping scientists commercialize their research.
Naturally, Shelby will do what all investment team members do at Compound, including spending time with our portfolio, scaling the firm’s thesis development, and making new investments against these theses.
While we plan to release a deeper dive in our working thesis areas, a few that we’re particularly excited about right now include:
- AI-Enabled Medical Devices
- Biological Removal of Forever Chemicals
- Biomanufacturing Infrastructure
- DNA Synthesis
- Food as Medicine
- Nanomedicines
- Novel Pediatric Care Models
- OTC Microbial Medicines
- Psychedelic Medicine
- Science-based Mental Health
- Software for Bioinformatics
- Synthetic Dairy Products
We couldn’t be more excited to continue to back companies at the earliest stages in these areas and more. If you’re interested in chatting please reach out to Shelby (and the rest of the team) on Twitter or via email.
Welcome Shelby.
