Reed Jobs, the son of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, is seeking to establish his oncology-focused venture firm Yosemite as a significant force in cancer biotech, three years after founding it in 2023. In an interview with TechCrunch, he emphasised that he would rather discuss the science of curing cancer than his famous surname, framing Yosemite's distinctive approach of building biotech companies from scratch out of early academic research using a blend of philanthropy and investment capital. The firm's mission matters because Jobs argues cancer cures are not simply waiting to be found within existing pharmaceutical companies but must be created through new science, an effort he says is being accelerated by AI's growing role in drug discovery and clinical trial design.

Yosemite now has a team of 17 and announced the first close of a second fund earlier in the year, targeting $350 million, of which roughly a third is directed towards companies it builds itself alongside academics at institutions such as Yale, Berkeley and Stanford. The firm works exclusively in oncology, which Jobs notes accounts for around 40% of biotech, and channels 2.5% of assets under management plus $1 million a year from management fees into a no-strings-attached donor-advised fund to de-risk early ideas in university labs. Portfolio highlights include Azalea, which grew from a grant to Jennifer Doudna's lab and is now in the clinic, and Quarry, built with founder Craig Crews around an approach called induced proximity, while Jobs also cites his team's pioneering work in epigenetic gene editing as evidence Yosemite can open new areas of medicine ahead of rivals.