Reed Jobs is making Yosemite an AI oncology company factory

Reed Jobs has transformed Yosemite from a 2023 oncology fund into a 17-person venture firm that uses AI, grantmaking, and company formation to accelerate cancer science from university labs to clinical development. The firm, which raised over $200 million for its first fund and is targeting $350 million for a second, plans to invest about one-third of that capital into companies it builds or co-builds with academics, with the rest going to outside startups. Yosemite aims to make cancer non-lethal within a generation by funding early research and creating companies when science becomes product-ready.

Reed Jobs https://www.parkerici.org/person/reed-p-jobs/?ref=runtimewire has turned Yosemite https://yosemite.co/?ref=runtimewire from a 2023 oncology fund into a 17-person venture firm trying to use AI, grantmaking and company formation to pull cancer science out of university labs and into clinical development faster, according to a July 11th TechCrunch interview https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/11/reed-jobs-would-rather-talk-about-curing-cancer-than-his-last-name/?ref=runtimewire . Jobs, the son of Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell Jobs, would rather define Yosemite by the disease category than by his surname. That is the right instinct. Yosemite's actual bet is specific: oncology remains large enough to absorb specialist capital, academic labs still hold investable science that traditional VCs often see too early, and AI is becoming useful enough in drug discovery and clinical trials to change the cost curve before a startup reaches late-stage development. Yosemite's own phrasing is sweeping. Its homepage says the San Francisco firm aims to make cancer "non-lethal within our lifetime." The operational version is narrower and more investable: use no-strings-attached philanthropy to fund early cancer research, then create or back companies when the science starts to look like a product. Jobs has been working toward that model for longer than Yosemite's roughly three-year life. The Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy says he spent eight years as managing director of health at Emerson Collective before launching Yosemite in August 2023, and that he holds a B.A. in History and International Security and an M.A. in History from Stanford University. Yosemite was spun out of Emerson Collective Health with an oversubscribed first close of more than $200 million, according to the firm's August 1st, 2023 launch announcement https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/emerson-collective-health-spins-off-to-form-new-investment-fund-yosemite-announces-first-close-of-oversubscribed-200m-fund-to-accelerate-transformative-cancer-ventures-301890424.html?ref=runtimewire . That original fund was backed by institutions and individuals that gave Yosemite a scientific network as well as capital. Yosemite named The Rockefeller University, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and John Doerr among its limited partners, with Emerson Collective also participating as an LP in Fund I. The second fund changes the scale The current news is an update, not a launch. Yosemite began as a standalone firm in 2023. The more relevant timeline is that Yosemite announced a first close for its second fund earlier in 2026 and is targeting $350 million, according to TechCrunch. Forbes reported in January https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2026/01/29/reed-jobs-lost-his-father-steve-to-cancer-now-his-cancer-vc-firm-has-raised-200-million/?ref=runtimewire that Yosemite had raised more than $200 million toward that target, with LPs including Amgen, Memorial Sloan Kettering, MIT and John Doerr. Jobs told TechCrunch that Yosemite plans to put roughly one-third of that $350 million into companies the firm builds itself or co-builds with academics, including at Yale, Berkeley and Stanford. The rest is for outside companies Yosemite wants to join. That split is the firm in miniature: part venture fund, part research network, part formation shop. The incentives are different from a generalist AI fund. Yosemite cannot make its money by chasing every foundation-model adjacency or by funding software teams that can ship weekly. Cancer startups spend years moving from mechanism to molecule to animal data to human trials, and failures often arrive as scientific dead ends rather than missed sales targets. Jobs told TechCrunch Yosemite has close to 25 companies across both funds and that two have failed for scientific reasons. That failure rate is not an embarrassment in this category. It is the price of entering before a company is fully legible to conventional capital. Yosemite's way to manage the risk is to fund early research before it becomes a priced venture round, then reserve the right to help form a company around the work. Philanthropy is Yosemite's sourcing engine Yosemite's grant program is central to the strategy. In February, Yosemite said it had deployed more than $18 million in grants through a donor-advised charitable vehicle since launch, with the money aimed at early-stage research that precedes traditional investment. The same announcement cited preclinical work led by Yale's Craig Crews as one example of research that helped inform the formation of Quarry Thera https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/yosemite-announces-more-than-18-million-deployed-in-grants-302685606.html?ref=runtimewire , a biotech company working on small-molecule drugs that modulate protein interactions. TechCrunch points to two portfolio examples Jobs is using to show the model. Azalea https://azaleatx.com/?ref=runtimewire came from a grant to Jennifer Doudna's lab and is now in the clinic, according to TechCrunch. Quarry https://www.quarrythera.com/?ref=runtimewire was built with Crews around induced proximity, a therapeutic approach that uses proximity between proteins to drive a biological effect. The American Cancer Society partnership shows how Yosemite turns grantmaking into a repeatable sourcing map. The 2026 Yosemite-American Cancer Society Award https://www.cancer.org/research/we-fund-cancer-research/apply-research-grant/grant-types/yosemite-acs-award.html?ref=runtimewire funds two-year cancer research projects at up to $300,000 in direct costs, plus 10% indirect costs, with topics that include post-transcriptional and post-translational regulation in cancer as well as induced proximity and protein modulation. Those are early scientific zones where a lab result may be too young for a company pitch but still valuable enough to watch closely. There is a clean business reason to do that work philanthropically. A no-strings grant can reach faculty and postdocs before company formation pressure distorts the research. If the science holds up, Yosemite already has a relationship with the lab, knowledge of the field and a potential path to venture financing. If the science fails, the loss sits in the grant vehicle rather than in a priced startup cap table. AI is moving from tool to thesis Jobs told TechCrunch AI is now a large part of Yosemite's work. The clearest use case he described is clinical trials, where patient recruitment and retention remain major cost and timing problems. He said a Phase 3 cancer trial costs about $260 million and succeeds about one-third of the time, then pointed to synthetic control arms as one way AI could reduce the number of patients required for a trial. The claim matters because AI in biotech has suffered from broad promises and uneven proof. Jobs is framing AI less as an oracle that invents drugs by itself and more as infrastructure that can accelerate routine scientific work, find druggable pockets on difficult proteins and improve trial design. That is a more durable version of the AI pitch because it maps to bottlenecks pharma companies already pay to solve. Yosemite's oncology focus also gives AI a tighter target. Jobs told TechCrunch oncology is 40% of biotech. That figure is his estimate, and the larger point is easier to verify than the exact denominator: cancer remains one of the deepest markets for therapeutics, diagnostics, devices, radiopharmaceuticals and clinical-trial software. A specialist firm can build pattern recognition across modalities that a broad life-sciences investor may spread across immunology, rare disease, metabolic disease and tools. Yosemite's team is built accordingly. Daniel McHugh https://bigs.bio.org/speakers/daniel-mchugh?ref=runtimewire , listed by BIO as Yosemite's lead investor, oversees therapeutics and digital health investments in oncology. Before helping launch Yosemite, McHugh spent seven years at Emerson Collective leading cancer-focused investment efforts and served as interim CEO of Tune Therapeutics, according to BIO. The market is finally helping The timing is better for Yosemite than it was at launch. In 2023, biotech was still working through the correction that followed the pandemic-era funding boom. Jobs told TechCrunch that when Yosemite launched, the XBI biotech index was still down sharply from its 2021 highs and pharma had not yet become acquisitive. He now sees a different market, with lower interest-rate pressure and a major patent cliff pushing large drug companies to buy or partner for new pipelines. That backdrop is why Yosemite's model is worth watching beyond Jobs's biography. The biggest pharma companies need assets. Academic labs need non-dilutive funding. Founders need investors who understand how long biology takes. Yosemite is trying to sit between those groups and take company-formation risk earlier than a standard VC partnership would. The open questions are the ones that matter for any young venture firm. Yosemite has not disclosed a final close for Fund II. The long-term returns are unknowable this early. Its grant-to-company model can produce privileged access to science, but access does not equal clinical success. Cancer biology has punished confident capital for decades. Jobs's advantage is that he is not pretending Yosemite is a software fund with faster lab coats. He is building around the slowest part of the process: the gap between an academic idea and a financed company with a credible path into patients. AI may compress some of that timeline. Philanthropy may widen the top of the funnel. Venture capital still has to underwrite the hard part, where the science either works or it does not.