Gero Reaches $34M in Equity Funding to Turn the Physics of Aging Into Medicines

Following a Chugai (Roche Group) collaboration with up to $250M in milestones in addition to royalties, and inspired by mammals that defy the rules of aging, Gero uses physics-first AI and human longitudinal data to develop medicines that substantially slow aging and treat age-related diseases.

SINGAPORE & SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Gero, which previously secured a collaboration with Chugai Pharmaceutical, a member of the Roche Group, including an upfront payment and up to $250M in milestones in addition to royalties, today announced $17M in new financing, bringing total equity funding to $34M.

Gero combines longitudinal human data, AI, and a physics-based aging framework for therapeutic target identification and drug design. Gero's approach was born from a crucial but underappreciated observation: nature has already achieved dramatic slowing of aging and extremely long healthy life in several complex mammals. While in humans the risk of death roughly doubles every eight years after early adulthood, naked mole-rats, for example, can live about five times longer than expected for their size while showing essentially no increase in mortality risk with age. This observation led Gero to develop a physics-based framework that decodes the underlying physical laws of aging from human data to discover new medicines.

While most of aging-focused biotech pursues reversing or reprogramming aging to restore youthful cell function, Gero's framework identifies slowing aging itself as a more durable lever on healthspan, functional decline, and lifespan.

Gero’s thesis is that aging and age-related disease onset follow quantifiable physical laws that can be read in human data and turned into medicines. Gero trained AI world models of human health on approximately 10 million curated longitudinal medical records, selected from more than 100 million records and integrated with molecular, omics, and genetic data. The models distinguish reversible disease biology from deeper, long-timescale aging processes to identify "hub" targets that standard methods miss — single mechanisms shared across multiple chronic diseases. Under the Chugai collaboration, Chugai is developing drug candidates against targets identified by Gero; Gero also previously conducted a research collaboration with Pfizer in 2023.

By pairing a validated discovery engine with non-dilutive partnership revenue, Gero is positioned to advance a portfolio of both disease-modifying and aging-slowing programs in parallel, with proceeds supporting preclinical development of its pipeline and continued expansion of pharmaceutical partnerships. The financing comes as pharma increasingly seeks mechanisms that act across many diseases at once, the same cross-disease property that made GLP-1 medicines a more-than-$50-billion category.

The financing included participation from Melnichek Investments, an AI-focused investment firm whose founder was behind AIMatter, acquired by Google and multiple other AI startups acquired by major tech companies; an early backer of a company acquired by Facebook, now Meta; the co-founder of NYSE-listed EPAM Systems; and senior operators from the pharmaceutical and technology sectors.

"Target selection is the critical bottleneck in translating aging biology into medicines, and the field has not lacked ideas, it has lacked human-evidence-grounded targets that pharma is ready to develop," said Brian K. Kennedy, PhD, Distinguished Professor at the National University of Singapore, former President and CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, and Independent Director of Gero. "Gero is one of the few groups bringing published aging theory, longitudinal human data, and pharmaceutical-partner validation into a single discovery engine."

"Gero stands out for grounding discovery in a published, physics-based framework and real human data, and for turning that science into a working platform, which is why I invested," said Anita Cosgrove, former Senior Vice-President, Strategic Business Development at Human Longevity, Inc., and an investor in Gero.

"Countless molecular events happen every second, both in a naked mole-rat and in us — yet over decades our risk of death doubles every eight years while theirs stays almost flat. That gap is a physics problem. We've spent a decade building the theory. What's changed is that we now have the data — tens of millions of longitudinal health records — and generative AI that can extract the mathematics of aging directly from that data, the way physics has always worked but at a scale and complexity no analytical theory could reach. In aerospace, that level of modelling transformed engineering outcomes. We expect the same in medicine. And aging is the place to start: it's the shared engine behind virtually every chronic disease, which means slowing it is the highest-leverage intervention in human health," said Peter Fedichev, PhD, Co-Founder and CEO of Gero.

The framework underlying the platform was originated by Co-Founder and CEO Peter Fedichev, PhD, and developed across leading journals including Nature Communications over more than a decade, more recently with Jan Gruber, PhD, of the National University of Singapore. The work shaped gerophysics, the application of physics to aging, now recognized in a dedicated Nature Portfolio (npj Aging) collection co-edited by Fedichev, Kennedy, and Gruber among others.

About Gero

Gero is a physics-first AI drug discovery and development company focused on age-related diseases and the biology of aging. The platform builds AI models of human health from large-scale longitudinal real-world data, combining clinical, molecular, omics, and genetic data with physics-based modeling and AI-enabled target discovery, paired with ProtoBind-Diff, a generative AI model for small-molecule design directly from protein sequence. Gero partners with pharmaceutical companies on age-related disease and advances proprietary programs aimed at intervention in aging itself. Gero's scientific work has been published in Science, Nature Communications, and other leading journals. The company is headquartered in Singapore, with a U.S. subsidiary in San Francisco. To learn more, visit gero.ai and follow Gero on LinkedIn and X at @hacking_aging.