Dimension closes $800M Fund III to back frontier science and compute, including AI drug discovery and next-gen semiconductors

Speaker 1: Maybe 20% of equity in your company. I I'm interested that this is its own website, Vahua, vacation with an artist. It feels like it's directly in line with the Airbnb everything app road map. The idea was that you would be able to go. Anyway, we have our next guest in the waiting room. Let's bring in Zavain Dar from Dimension. He's the founder. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 2: Here he is. How are What's going on?

Speaker 1: Give us the news. We gotta hit the The newest size lord. The newest size lord to capital allocator. Boom.

Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. He just hit it himself. That was that was good good alignment. Great stuff.

Speaker 1: How much did you raise? We didn't even get the number. We just went right

Speaker 10: the Eight eight hundred million?

Speaker 1: 800,000,000.

Speaker 2: I'm sorry that you couldn't, you know, pull together the last 200 short. But Maybe. 800.

Speaker 1: Who's counting?

Speaker 2: Close enough. Close enough. Hey.

Speaker 1: They're over 1,000,000,006 in assets.

Speaker 8: So That's right.

Speaker 2: That's a good start. It's a good start.

Speaker 10: Dimension $3,800,000,000, at our legal hard gap. So I I think we went out for 700 or thereabouts.

Speaker 3: Okay.

Speaker 10: Legally, can't raise more than than a

Speaker 6: The put

Speaker 2: me in jail

Speaker 1: by race We

Speaker 2: all know there was we all know the demand was there. We all know the Yeah. Talk about fund one and two Yeah. Since it's your first time on the show. What what got you to this, you know, monumental fund?

Speaker 10: Yeah. Fund one, 350. That was a 2022 vintage. Bond two was 500. That's a 2025 vintage, so just about twelve months ago. We started the firm. My co founders, Adam, Don, and I would spend the last decade investing across the Union of Life Sciences and Technology. Fund one was very much so at the intersection, so companies that were equal parts tech, equal parts life sciences. Fund two, we started to expand more so the union. Fund three, it really is the frontiers of science and compute. So companies that are touching silicon, next gen GPUs, CPUs for ML and AI architectures all the way through ML infrastructure. And then on the science side, world models, NeoLabs, you know, really kind of pioneering both physics, but then also biotech and next gen medicines as well.

Speaker 1: Do you think we'll see a a coalescing of business models in the next generation of tech enabled bio companies, biotech companies? Because we're there's an opportunity to be sort of really full stack, train a model, use it to develop a drug, take that drug all the way through the FDA approval process, use AI to write the applications and go back and forth and then own the intellectual property all the way. That feels like a lot of different CapEx muscles flexing at the same time, but maybe that is the future. How do you see it actually playing out? What's the common pattern?

Speaker 10: You know, there's a my my cofounder, Adam, is Australian and he's a he has a want of saying, horses for courses, which for, I think the North American audience here, it means to each their own, more or less. So we We're gonna start using that

Speaker 2: for our North American audience. Horses for courses. Horses for courses.

Speaker 1: I like

Speaker 10: Big in big in Japan. Yeah. Or for example, Chai, which is I think you maybe had Josh and Jack on the show in in the past. Announced the round that we helped to co lead with Index and Sequoia and Kleiner last week. Mhmm. They are very much so doing the latter, which you described, selling their services as a SaaS product

Speaker 6: Yeah.

Speaker 10: Into pharma. On the other hand, we have companies like New Limit that are developing similar ilks of technology, but doing so with the express intent of developing their medicines end to end and one day actually commercializing medicines that affect aging and longevity.

Speaker 1: Are aging longevity the the the hot topics because they're so universal? Or do you think you'll see more of the I don't know if I'd call it the traditional biotech playbook, but there's often this, you know, there's a whole pipeline of biotech companies that are targeting, like, there's five thousand people that have this rare disease and it still turns into a billion dollar acquisition and it's this odd pattern that doesn't really ever make it to the front page of Time Magazine, but obviously has an impact both financially and medically on those people that were suffering from that

Speaker 10: I both extremes are true. Earlier this year, RevMed had very stunning phase three result for their lead drug affecting patients with pancreatic cancer. For the rest of humanity, a thousand years from now, two thousand years from now, if you have pancreatic cancer, you should have a somewhat effective treatment and that's really based on a biotech based in California that in the last six months developed and kind of showed that clinical data and that's stunning. Of course, pancreatic cancer, if that's not as prevalent as aging which everybody has or maybe obesity or something. At the same time, we are I think witnessing a revolution of what it means or a re underwriting of what it means to be diseased And even something like obesity or maybe ten years ago or fifteen years ago, pharma and biotech frankly, they didn't invest in these areas because they didn't consider it a disease. They considered it a behavioral problem. Today, it's considered a disease and it's the largest drug on the planet. You're seeing it in areas like aging and longevity, inflammation, immunology. DUPIXENT, if anyone has atopic derm or eczema, it's one of the largest drugs on the planet today. Twenty years ago, no one would touch that because diseases that were skin related weren't considered serious enough. So we are starting to see I think a redefinition of the types of areas where biotech and pharma can actually play.

Speaker 2: I'm sure you got asked this, you know, during the fundraising process, but what's your overall world view on investment opportunities around peptides as a category, you know, basically drugs that that people are taking somewhat recreationally now, but have a bunch of different benefits that have that are in a, you know, sort of continuous gray area. But what's your what's your outlook on on the category? Because there's billions of dollars of revenue there. There's some really interesting, exciting, at least indicators that they can have great impacts. What's your view?

Speaker 10: I take the red and the yellow shots on Monday and Tuesdays and the green and the blue shots on Fridays and Saturdays and my wife doesn't care. I'm kidding. Would not recommend this stuff with anybody. Look, there is a history of peptides and hormone mimetics as drugs. GLP-1s, GLP-1s are in some sense those exactly. Whenever you're sticking anything into yourself, you want to actually know what it is. You want to know, make sure that there's no impurities in it. We don't understand the biology, the mechanisms, in many of these cases. And so, I think even the scuttlebutt that you guys and I am probably hearing about the efficacy or effectiveness of, you know, the SF tech community or the New York kind of, you know, tech community taking these things. My suspicion is that's probably more placebo than not. I'd be very careful about doing any of this. I certainly wouldn't myself do it nor would I let my friends and family do it.

Speaker 1: How do you think AI affects sort of like, I don't know if it's, we call it, repurposing drugs, but the big GLP one breakthrough for obesity was originally a diabetes drug. And there's been a few examples of drugs in history, many examples actually, where it started as a heart medication and then became erectile dysfunction drug. And it feels like in an age of AI, even if you don't get the super intelligence that can just imagine the cure for cancer, You, at the very least, could potentially test every drug against every indication maybe more efficiently. What does sort of like cross application of biotechnology look like in the future?

Speaker 10: I I think two things are true. With ML and AI, we are better able to understand the root cause of disease, mechanism pathway, and kind of the industry nomenclature. And with a better understanding of mechanisms and pathways, we can repurpose molecules, whether they're biologics or peptides or small molecules, against those where we know that they are known to be effective. The other, which is simultaneously true, historically, we have the vast majority of known targets for disease biology have been undreadable. And so it's not a question of taking a cell of acid from Pfizer or Novartis or Lilly. It's a question of we just don't know how to design the molecules to actually perturb those proteins intracellularly or extracellularly yet. Sure. My suspicion is in the next five to six to seven years with the companies in the modes of the chaise of the world, for example, we will have technologies to perturb what we wanna perturb. Yeah. And so we'll both be able to repurpose when there is a shelved asset against kind of our new knowledge of biology, but then also leverage generative AI and ML to create molecules to protect our biology where maybe the shelved acids don't quite yet exist.

Speaker 2: What letter are you most proud of and why?

Speaker 10: Z is a good letter.

Speaker 2: No, no. I'm talking about your letters.

Speaker 10: I'm kidding.

Speaker 2: I'm kidding. Underrated letter.

Speaker 10: In terms of letters that we have published from Dimension?

Speaker 2: Yes. You published some beautiful letters.

Speaker 10: But idea in

Speaker 2: a letter, the chat was asking. Yeah.

Speaker 10: Yeah. The what if we're right letter, that was actually, you know, first written as a letter confidentially to our partners and LPs in q one of this year as part of our annual 2025 recap. And we anonymized part of it. We took out some parts of, obviously, the financial information and decided to share it with the broader kind of entrepreneurial tech and science audience. Think it resonated with people, I think, especially in this moment in time where there is so much tension geopolitically and technologically and from a class and labor perspective. So many things like, so many things are happening, and there's a lot of tension. And to maybe take a step back and say, hey. What what's the good that's happening if we're right in developing these technologies and sciences? How does that bend the arc of humanity and society for the better? That was fun to write. I think it got a groove with a good audience, and so we're pretty proud of that. Think more people can be espousing and writing, you know, that sort of stuff.

Speaker 1: Last question. How many cups of coffee a day do you drink? There's new reporting this as a five.

Speaker 5: 15.

Speaker 1: It's good for you. 15, really?

Speaker 10: I'm kidding.

Speaker 3: Are you

Speaker 1: a coffee maxer?

Speaker 10: I I try to

Speaker 3: limit it.

Speaker 10: I I have my fridge cigarette.

Speaker 1: There we go. There we go. Cheers.

Speaker 10: I am.

Speaker 2: There we go.

Speaker 10: Cheers, man. Yeah. I I try to limit it to probably two or three. If I if I do have a cup of coffee after four, I'm probably walking until 2PM.

Speaker 1: Okay. So well within the healthy limits. Healthy guy working on health and AI. Well, congratulations on the fun. Thank you

Speaker 2: Congrats so much for to, to you and all your partners.

Speaker 1: Yeah. On an absolutely generational run over there. We'd love

Speaker 2: to forward to meeting more of your founders.

Speaker 1: Yeah. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Up next. Up next.

Speaker 2: We have Chad Edwards.

Speaker 1: We'll bring Chad in in just a second. Briefly, I'm gonna tell you about this interesting screenshot from Reddit, an LLM stenography tools, steganography tool. How do you pronounce that? Kinda neat with how the UI the EU is trying to gain access to all communication. So, basically, you use an LLM to transform your text messages, secret messages. They look normal, but in fact, there's a decoded message. So on the left, it says message to Bob. I got coffee downtown, and it's actually pretty good. Thinking of what to make for dinner. Want to come help me cook? Overdid it on the soup yesterday though. And that is actually secretly encoded to mean they caught Matthew last week because he spoke against them. Explain how this works, Tyler.

Speaker 4: Yeah. So so it's not the the LLM is not actually doing the encrypting. Basically, encrypt it first using some, like, standard process, and then you get, like, the output of that is, like, some ciphertext.

Speaker 1: Like a lookup table, basically, or something.

Speaker 4: So basically, you you encrypt it, you get some, like, something that looks like scrambled, like a scrambled string.

Speaker 1: Okay.

Speaker 4: And you basically hydrate that. You have these these bits and then you basically use the bits to determine which token you're gonna use in the LLM. You basically need to use an open source LLM.

Speaker 1: People are accusing chat. John actually in the chat have been doing this for months, sending coded messages to everyone.

Speaker 4: Well It is very cool

Speaker 8: though.

Speaker 1: I thought this was a cool idea. I think it's a cool demo. I don't know that it's wildly useful, but for certain people that need to send secret messages back and forth, go ahead. Also, they're calling North Korea no co, like it's the cool trendy part of town. I thought that was a funny post.