Announcing Dimension II
Where do I think the next amazing revolution is going to come from and this is going to be flat out one of the biggest ones ever? There's no question that digital biology is going to be it. For the very first time in our history, in human history, biology has the opportunity to be engineering, not science. For the very first time, we know how to represent biology, understand the language of biology. We can represent the language of chemistry. It's never happened before. And now we're going to have incredible tools that bring the world of biology into the world of computer science. And that is going to be profound. And so if you happen to love this intersection it's going to be very rich with opportunities. It's going to be a giant industry.
— Jensen Huang (adapted)
Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.
— Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect (1864-1912)
To our current and future Founders,
Hi again. Today we write to announce the launch of Dimension II, a $500M fund to support and partner with the leading entrepreneurs pioneering at the vanguard of life sciences and technology.
A lot has changed since we last wrote to you in early 2023 - then announcing the launch of our firm with $350M raised for Dimension I. That was days removed from the reveal of public facing GPTs, before AI swept the Nobels for physics and chemistry, when A100s and H100s were insider lingo for those in the know, when Jensen Huang’s Nvidia was 1/7th its current market cap, and before medicines - yes therapeutics - would set forth on an inevitable path to usurp the iPhone as the largest consumer products in the world (still not done, but we’ll take the under on the decade for metabolism derived medicines).
While the world around us has shifted, dramatically so, we’ve been busy designing a firm aspiring to be leading partners for you. In doing so we’ve built Dimension to be equal parts computer science and life science - indeed our entire team has technical degrees in either science or engineering (unlike many of our peers, no MBAs yet - though we’re not dogmatically opposed). We’ve established a research function to document emerging theses, share critical intel, and provide unbiased sounding boards for our portfolio and the broader ecosystems we operate in.
And most importantly, we’ve sought out and partnered with a cohort of founders who will, between them, alter the trajectory of science, technology, and markets on this planet. A subset of those no longer in stealth: Joshua, Jack, Stig, Sunny, Alex, Bogdan, David, Ahmed, Frank, Viswa, Jacob, Blake, Brian, Mostafa, Rich, Tim, Chris, Nick, Theo, Markus, John, Alex, Maged, John, Brandon, Nick, Akshay, April. The growing set of portfolio companies in Dimension I touch open source software to drug development, recently launched “newcos” to publicly listed growth cos, robotics and lab automation to SaaS, ML infrastructure to regenerative medicine, foundation models to physics informed molecular dynamics, and early target discovery to wholly-owned clinical trials.
Despite the seismic shifts brought from technology and science from the last 2 years, we contend that we still remain at the very beginning of accelerating overlapping curves of science and technology. If the last two turns around the sun brought about historical measures of progress and change, the next two will compound at a relative log scale. Indeed the singular constant we hold is for the derivative change, and to be more precise, accelerating change, itself. It’s with this lens that we write to you today to only broaden your ambitions and perspectives for tomorrow. We ascribe to Daniel Burnham’s 19th century call to arms: Make no little plans.
With Dimension II, we intend to do the same. We will continue our unabating pursuit, globally, across all stages, for the leading most ambitious entrepreneurs at the interfaces of life science and technology. We will continue our style of intentional, concentrated investing – preferring rigor and depth in our underwriting, and bandwidth in relationship with you our entrepreneurs over a shotgunned “spray and pray”. Finally we will be relentless as co-stewards of your equity, turning over all stones to maximize odds for your ambitions and (large) plans.
Our work is not done. In early 2023 we wrote to you of myopic short-termism in capital markets, a corollary of the then budding bear market - and a need to define new primitives and playbooks for an emerging ilk of company that would leverage intrinsically overlapping manifolds of technology and science. Whereas we cannot (and don’t attempt to) change macroeconomic winds, we have honed our techno-scientific jibing and tacking, assembling early drafts for value creation and capture for these new forms of companies. We realize this is a many decade journey, and most likely these drafts will stay as such until the inevitable becomes the unmissable. Today you, and we, continue to operate as the technologist contrarians within the broader life science category. Tomorrow we intend for our collective work and measures to be the category default: balancing high resolution fidelity and rigor in life sciences without sacrificing the exponential payoff from medium and long term technology j-curves.
To our future entrepreneurs: wherever this letter finds you, whenever on your journey, we look forward to finding lock-step together. In advance, thank you for your trust in us. We do not take it lightly.
Until we meet,
