Flagship Pioneering

Flagship Pioneering is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech company-creation platform founded in 1999 by Noubar Afeyan, that operates one of the most distinctive models in life science investing: rather than evaluating or funding existing startups, Flagship generates its own company ideas through an internal scientific exploration process, recruits the founding scientists and management teams, and incubates the companies within Flagship's campus before they graduate to operate independently. The firm has created more than 100 companies from scratch through this model, deploying more than $4 billion in capital. Moderna, the mRNA therapeutics company that Flagship co-founded in 2010 around the idea of using mRNA as a drug, became a $100 billion-plus company and one of the leading COVID-19 vaccine developers, completing a Nasdaq IPO in 2018. Other notable companies in the Flagship portfolio include Seer Bio, Cellarity, Generate Biomedicines, and LifeMine Therapeutics. Beyond its most famous creation in Moderna, the portfolio includes more than 100 companies spanning therapeutics, diagnostics, agriculture, and synthetic biology.