Laura Deming Keynote Speaker

Laura Deming is a venture capitalist and anti-aging pioneer. Her work focuses on life extension and using biological research to reduce or reverse the effects of aging.

After homeschooling in New Zealand, Laura moved to to San Francisco at just twelve years old to join Cynthia Kenyon’s lab at the University of California. Two years later, she was accepted to MIT to study Physics but later dropped out after being offered the Thiel Fellowship, and started a venture capital firm.

Deming is a partner at and founder of The Longevity Fund, a venture capital firm focused on aging and life extension. The firm raised $4 million in its first fund and $22 million for its second fund, in 2017. The Longevity Fund investments include Unity Biotechnology, which develops senolytic drugs targeting diseases of aging, Navitor Pharmaceuticals, and Metacrine.

Deming believes that science can be used to create biological immortality in humans, and has said that ending aging “is a lot closer than you might think”.  She has been featured in “30 Under 30” by Forbes Magazine, and was one of the stars of “The Age of Ageing”, a documentary by National Geographic.  She also spoke at the 2012 Singularity Summit and at the 2013 TEDMED conference. 

In 2018, Deming launched Age1, a four-month startup accelerator program focused on founders creating longevity companies. The program graduated its first class of six on October 10, 2018, with companies including Fauna Bio, a startup using the biology of hibernation to aid in heart attack and stroke recovery, and Spring Discovery, focused on accelerating aging therapeutic research with machine learning. In August 2018, Deming also began advising the newly launched Pioneer Fund, a fund designed to find talent and “lost Einsteins” around the world, for projects in longevity.