Reed Jobs' Yosemite raises second oncology fund, targets $350 million

Reed Jobs, son of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, is raising a second fund for Yosemite, the oncology-focused venture firm he launched in 2023, targeting $350 million. In an interview with TechCrunch, Jobs said the firm has a team of 17 and is seeing "extreme activity" across its strategy of building biotech companies from early academic research using a mix of philanthropy and venture capital. About one-third of the new fund will go into companies Yosemite creates itself, either from its own ideas or in collaboration with academic labs at Yale, Berkeley, and Stanford, while the rest backs outside founders. A separate 2.5% of assets under management flows into a donor-advised fund for no-strings-attached grants, plus $1 million annually from management fees. Yosemite's first-fund portfolio includes Azalea, spun out of a grant to Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna's lab and now in clinical trials, and Quarry, built with serial founder Craig Crews around induced-proximity technology that degrades disease-causing proteins by dragging them to the cell's disposal system rather than blocking them directly. Jobs said AI has grown from a curiosity to a major part of what Yosemite does, accelerating both drug discovery and clinical trial design. The firm has pioneered areas including epigenetic gene editing and safe delivery of gene-editing tools to specific cells, a longtime bottleneck for the field. Jobs acknowledged it is early for performance data but argued Yosemite's edge lies in creating new areas of medicine before other firms arrive.