Freenome Co-founder & Investor Chat Where Big Data Meets Big Bio

Amir Nashat of Polaris Partners (left) and Freenome co-founder Riley Ennis

Through the years, Xconomy has taken many of the stories we’ve published about innovation and entrepreneurship and brought them to life on stage at our events. In the process, we have learned that combining an entrepreneur with a venture investor for a one-on-one chat can provide some fascinating insights into the startup process.

So we’re looking forward with anticipation to the conversation we’ve arranged between Amir Nashat, a managing partner in the Boston office of Polaris Partners, and Riley Ennis, a co-founder and the chief operating officer of Freenome, at our San Diego forum on Big Data Meets Big Biology on April 26.

We just posted the agenda; you can find it here.

Headquartered in South San Francisco, Freenome is a health technology startup that says it is developing accurate, accessible, and non-invasive technologies for early detection of cancer and other diseases. The idea is to proactively treat diseases at their earliest and most manageable stages—and both the company and its technology lie at the intersection of Big Data and Big Biology.

Since it was founded in 2014, Freenome has raised more than $77 million from leading venture investors in both healthcare and technology—including Andreessen Horowitz, GV, Verily, Anne Wojcicki, Section 32, and Polaris.

Nashat, who joined Polaris in 2002, is familiar with San Diego’s life sciences scene as a frequent visitor and investor in aTyr Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:LIFE]]), Fate Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:FATE]]), and Metacrine.

Ennis is a Dartmouth College grad (a double major in economics and molecular biology) who worked on cancer nanotechnology research at the Dartmouth Hitchcock-Medical Center. Before co-founding Freenome, he was a 2013 Thiel Fellow, the two-year program established by former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel that gives teenagers $100,000 to drop out of college and start a company.

We’re looking for Ennis and Nashat to talk about their respective experiences as a startup founder and venture investor—how their relationship began and how it evolved through the early funding process. We’ve asked Ennis to explain the technology innovation that Freenome developed and Nashat to explain why he invested.

You can join the discussion on April 26th, at Big Data Meets Big Biology with leaders in genomics, healthtech, academics, and other fields at the Illumina Theater at The Alexandria.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.