Investment firm Breakout Ventures has $114 million in new venture capital funds that it expects to put toward neuroscience start-ups and firms using technology to make “science scalable,” as managing partner Lindy Fishburne puts it.
Already, Breakout has invested some of the money, which it identifies as Fund III, in three start-ups: Reach Industries, a maker of robotics software for labs; an unnamed firm using computational chemistry for small-molecule discovery; and another unnamed firm focused on commercializing novel science.
“We sit well in between traditional life science funds and maybe tech funds that are paying attention to biotechnology,” Fishburne says.
In an interview, Fishburne describes Breakout’s investment approach as agnostic when it comes to disease areas and modalities. Instead, she and her team focus on areas where they believe new discoveries are on the verge of enabling commercial products. Neuroscience is interesting to her, she says, because of recent biomarker discoveries, as is the increasing prevalence of software tools that can analyze electronic health data.
“One category that some of our initial investments in Fund III are in is fundamentally taking [artificial intelligence] and technology that has not been deployed in making science scalable in the past,” Fishburne says. “Tools and technologies that have been used in other industries, I think, we will now start to basically pour in to open up opportunities in science to be more repeatable and more scalable.”
As an example of this, Fishburne cites Noetik, an AI biotech start-up Breakout invested in back in 2024. Noetik uses spatial data to get information about how cancer cells work and which patients might benefit from certain drugs. In 2025, less than a year after Breakout’s investment, Noetik signed a precision immunotherapy deal with the drugmaker Agenus. At the beginning of 2026, it struck a similar deal with pharma giant GSK, which paid Noetik $50 million up front.
Fishburne says she expects to make a total of 17–20 investments from the new fund, with check sizes ranging from $500,000 to $5 million. Breakout typically invests at the very early stages; often, the firm is a start-up’s first institutional investor.
Fishburne says Breakout leads about half of the rounds it invests in and takes a double-digit equity percentage. “We like the messy start, where there’s lots of unknowns,” Fishburne says. “That’s just, to me, way more exciting and fulfilling.”
Rowan Walrath is an associate editor and life sciences reporter at C&EN.
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