Nan Li, Dimension Capital

Cofounder and Managing Partner, Dimension Capital

In March 2022, Obvious Ventures alum Nan Li cofounded Dimension Capital, a firm that invests in companies that combine data science and biotech research. At the time, technology market insights company CB Insights noted that 2022 investments in the health sector were down 35% from the previous year, yet Dimension’s first raise, seeking $300 million, was oversubscribed. Nan shares how technology and biology are coming together to amplify each other in profound ways.

Tell us about Dimension’s journey since being established in 2022.

My partners and I had all been in venture for about a decade each. It took us almost all of 2022 to build up the firm and fundraise for it—it’s no different than starting a company where you have to build out a set of materials and get going. In 2022, we did all the back office for legal incorporation, branding, and completed the website design. We also raised $350 million for the first fund. We launched publicly in January 2023, and last year was all about setting a foundation for the firm, bringing in the first team members, adding to the portfolio, and investing behind our thesis area.

Dimension was the first fund at the intersection of life and computer sciences. Tell us what it’s like to write the playbook for this sector.

With any sector or industry going through change, traditional philosophies and ways of thinking must be recalibrated, which is happening in software right now with the emergence of AI copilots. In our world, the running paradigm is that biology is too hard to make rational causal decisions; instead, we must rely on chance discoveries turning into medicines—every biological discovery is framed as a happy lightning-in-a-bottle event to be captured.

At Dimension, we believe in engineering biology, and many of our companies are working towards that goal. They believe that they can build repeatable discovery platforms that interrogate and learn biology in a productized way and create a series of discoveries, which is fundamentally antithetical to how the industry has run for the better part of half a century. All our companies have a role in stitching together these new technologies that have come online in the last decade: new lab instruments, molecular tools, data science, and machine learning. This allows scientists and modern biotechs to be much more rigorous about how they interrogate biology and discover so that it’s not this slow-paced series of experiments that gatekeep our ability to make progress but Lamborghini engines humming away, running hundreds of thousands of experiments every week in systematic ways. This era of platform and engineered biology is the simplest way of stating our beliefs.

Please tell us about two of your portfolio companies that reflect the breadth of Dimension’s niche.

Our style is to invest in and work closely with relatively few companies, so we’re partnered with a very tight-knit community of founders. I can highlight a couple that sit in different areas. One company we work with is called Automata, which automates experiments that scientists want to run in the lab—moving the plates, loading the machines and instruments, running the workloads—and the digital side: designing experiments, data capture, pipelining, and even some analysis, in one integrated system. The general view here is scientists should spend their time designing experiments and doing creative thinking, leaving the rote manual work to robots and software. Automata has a broad footprint in the life science industry and works with diverse groups: labs in biotech and pharma companies, national health centers, and diagnostic centers. 

NewLimit is a therapeutics and discovery company based in South Bay that is working on a problem in biology called epigenetic reprogramming. We’re all familiar with the idea that a genome encodes your particular molecular attributes, which are translated into proteins. Transcription factors are the molecular ingredients in your cells that help your DNA translate into RNA and proteins. Your cells, at different states of their life, have different behaviors, even though they have the same genome. A big part of the difference between an old cell and a young, higher-performing, healthier cell is the cocktail of transcripts available to it.

New Limit uses an automated technology platform to explore how different types of transcription factors could be used for therapeutics and to help reverse the age of a cell and, broadly, an organism like a person. This is an exciting area to explore for longevity purposes and different therapeutic areas.

Are there any institutional or paradigm shifts you’d like to see to accelerate this field?

Life science has risen in prominence and become popularized in consumer’s eyes over the last five years because of the pandemic. On top of broad-based consumer awareness of this vital industry, which is over a trillion dollars in our GDP, my wish list would be the recognition that life science is becoming more interdisciplinary and that different skill sets and backgrounds can participate. I wish it were widely known that people with math, computer science, and data science backgrounds can make a dent in life science and how diseases are studied. I would love for a broader call to action. Your skill sets are not just welcomed here, but required here. 

What does sustainability look like for Dimension?

We spend most of our time in human health working on molecules as therapeutic properties, but a lot of the advances in the underlying technologies that I mentioned—high throughput labs, experimentation, automation, data science, and the study of biology—also apply to industrial products and connection to sustainable materials. As the recombination of computer science and molecular science accelerates our ability to discover new molecules and engineer molecules with specific properties, the same toolkit of various advances can apply to industrial materials and finding better alternatives to petrochemical-derived materials. Synthetic and industrial bioengineering are cousins of computational biology and therapeutics, so Dimension works across that spectrum.

How do you define success when investing across these various companies and sectors?

High level: Dimension aims to be the premier, go-to firm for this next wave of digitally enabled life science. Life science is going through a generational transition in terms of how the entire industry works and the disciplines brought to these problem sets, and we want to build a dedicated firm that invests and collaborates with the leading founders of this new generation. The broader view is that we are entering into a historically unparalleled decade or multiple decades of productivity and biotech—a golden age of progress regarding our understanding of diseases and ability to discover and treat those diseases with new medicines across a broader set of modalities. It takes visionary entrepreneurs and biotechs to see that vision through and capital and patient investors who can play the long game. We hope we have a role there to fund and capitalize this exciting era for medicine.

How has your Private Office at CANOPY supported Dimension on this journey?

CANOPY was our first home—previously, I was working out of my house! Once we started bringing on team members, it made sense to have a space where we could all convene, and I didn’t want to be on Zoom with people joining Dimension for the first time. Face-to-face time is really important, and our job is meeting-heavy; we’re constantly sitting down with folks. I prefer in-person sit-downs to anything virtual. CANOPY was a great first office for us while we were setting things up and ramping up the team, and it helped us gel in terms of our culture and create a working style that we’re familiar with. As we transition to full-time offices, we will carry that with us.

If you could choose anyone as a mentor, who would it be?

James Anderson is someone that I respect tremendously in the investing world. He embodies patient, extremely well-informed, research-driven investing. He led Baillie Gifford for a few decades and has many public writings that showcase his approach. He’s an extremely thoughtful, absolutely prolific, long-term investor. I’m lucky enough to know him and get a lot out of each of our conversations. 

What has been your most significant learning to date?

In the startup and investment world, your inputs are somewhat disjointed from your outputs. You can’t rush a lot of the work that we do, which often has no outcome for long periods. I’ve learned to focus on the input: putting in the work every day, being operationally excellent, and knowing that good things will come out of it and you and your firm or your company will be successful.

**

Follow Nan on X @nanli and on LinkedIn. Follow Dimension on X @_DimensionCap and LinkedIn.