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Jason Pontin

General Partner

Jason is a member of DCVC’s investment team and leads the firm’s commu­ni­ca­tors as they tell the stories of portfolio companies. As an investor, Jason originates, finds, funds, and grows early-stage compu­ta­tional biology and chemistry startups that are treating previously intractable diseases, automating and accel­er­ating scientific discovery, and trans­forming dirty and inefficient industries into sustainable, high-growth sectors.

Jason joined DCVC in 2021, after working for three years as a Senior Partner and Senior Advisor at Flagship Pioneering. In 2020, with CEO Neil Dhawan, he cofounded Totus Medicines, a chemical biology company that has developed a platform that can screen billions of small molecules against thousands of cellular targets in a single experiment, finding effective new drugs thousands of times faster than traditional drug discovery and at a fraction of the cost. 

Before becoming a venture capitalist, Jason ran media companies and wrote for many publi­ca­tions, including Wired, Financial Times, and The Economist, and was a regular columnist for The New York Times. From 2004 to 2017, he was Editor in Chief and Publisher of MIT Technology Review, the world’s oldest technology magazine; he also performed a variety of admin­is­tra­tive roles at MIT, including serving as Senior Advisor to former President Susan Hockfield and founding Solve, the Institute’s open innovation platform, which deploys capital and other resources to grand challenges. Before that, he founded and edited The Acumen Journal of Life Sciences and was Editor of Red Herring, the bible of the dot-com boom. 

Jason was born in London, grew up in Northern California, and was educated in the United Kingdom at Oxford University. He now divides his time between Palo Alto and London. 

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