Reed Jobs's Yosemite Closes $350 Million Second Fund

Yosemite, the cancer-focused venture firm founded by Reed Jobs, has closed its second fund at $350 million — a $150 million jump from the fund's $200 million first close in January. Jobs shared the news exclusively with Fortune and the Term Sheet Podcast.

The limited partners read like a biotech who's-who: Amgen, AbbVie, MIT, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and venture legend John Doerr. That's institutional money betting on a very specific thesis — not curing cancer, but making it non-lethal.

What does 'non-lethal' actually mean?

Jobs, the son of Steve Jobs, draws a hard line between the two goals. "I don't think you'll cure cancer because we're human," he said. "Any human cell could become cancerous, right? And we're not going to stop having human cells. So, the idea that none of them could ever become cancer is preposterous. That risk's never going away."

His model is AIDS. There's still no vaccine, yet the disease has become survivable in the United States through drug cocktails.

"There's no vaccine for [AIDS], unfortunately," Jobs said. "I'd love for there to be, but in the absence of that, it's a far less scary disease now in the United States because it's non-lethal. With a cocktail of drugs, you can actually prevent mortality. In many ways, I think that's a massive victory and, in some ways, the most essential victory. Because it's victory over death, and that's what I want for cancer patients."

The mission is personal and long-running. Jobs started working in cancer labs as a teenager, after his father fell ill. Steve Jobs died in 2011.

How does the hybrid model work?

Yosemite runs two tracks at once. The first is traditional venture: early-stage checks for sizable stakes, with venture-scale returns as the stated goal. The second is philanthropic grants to university scientists.

The grant track exists to kill bad ideas cheaply, before venture money touches them. "With philanthropy, we can fail really cheaply," Jobs said. "That's the real wisdom behind this… One of the difficult and suboptimal things about my industry is how slow it is. And look, that's really important from a regulatory standpoint. But it also means you can waste a lot of money on things that aren't going to work, which is obviously really bad. What we've learned is that we can test new ideas really quickly and cheaply in universities with grants. And before we waste a lot of time, money, and resources, we can kind of flip over that first card."

Yosemite spun out of Laurene Powell Jobs's Emerson Collective in 2023.

What's in the first fund?

Fund I closed in 2024 at $263 million and built a deliberately mixed portfolio:

• Chai Discovery — AI drug discovery
• Teal Health — cervical cancer screening
• Tune Therapeutics — epi-therapeutic medicine
• Sage Care — care navigation

The spread reflects Jobs's view that no single company or technology gets there. "I don't think a company alone is going to make cancer non-lethal," he said. "I think it's going to be a consortium of things. It's going to be a really long push, probably cancer by cancer, more likely than not."

Why raise a second fund now?

Timing matters here. When Jobs launched Yosemite in 2023, biotech was in a slump. That's turned around, and he credits scientific advances from the past three years.

"You couldn't have told me four years ago that we'd be sitting here today and we would have the advancements in GLP-1s, in immunotherapy, in vaccines now, and against pancreatic cancer that we've achieved," Jobs said. "Those things have happened and have been titanic for the industry."

Asked what his father would advise, Jobs pointed to patience. "I think he'd say stay on the path, because something we have in common is we're really good long-term builders," he said. "Yosemite is not going to, as you know, reach its zenith of success in the next year or two. This is a long-term play that's going to take my whole life."

A $350 million war chest, pharma giants as LPs, and a decade-plus horizon — that's the bet that cancer becomes a managed disease before it becomes a beaten one.