Retro Bio: $180M Seed, Now Raising $1B
Retro Biosciences is raising a $1B round after Sam Altman's $180M seed, while Altos Labs holds a $3B financing commitment from investors including Bezos.
Sam Altman put $180M into Retro Biosciences at seed and is now participating in a $1B round (Cure, 2026). Mouse plasma pointed to a possible rejuvenating effect; Altman told founder Joe Betts-LaCroix he would fund further work if Betts-LaCroix pursued it. He did.
For scale: Altos Labs, another major longevity startup from the same Cure list, secured a $3B financing commitment in 2022 (investors include Bezos, Milner, ARCH Venture Partners), has about 500 employees, and is at Series B. Their focus is epigenetic reprogramming and computational modeling of biological systems. Retro has about 150 people.
Joe Betts-LaCroix on Eternal Search
Sources
9 Anti-Aging and Longevity Startups to Watch in 2026 - Cure.
Cure's 2026 longevity startup list provides concrete funding figures ($180M seed, $1B round for Retro; $3B for Altos) that demonstrate the scale of capital entering aging biology while highlighting the gap between funding and clinical results. Betts-LaCroix is a named individual whose Eternal Search investor profile gives readers a direct way to inspect the person behind these numbers, demonstrating the platform's value as a people-level intelligence layer on top of headline funding data.