In 2015, SOSV opened IndieBio San Francisco, Silicon Valley’s first biotech program that offered bio-labs as well as pre-seed investment to scientists ready to launch startups. IndieBio took the world by storm and biotech investing surged. In 2020, SOSV opened a second IndieBio in New York City.
Between 2015 and 2025, IndieBio’s 310 graduates raised $3.6 billion and helped establish SOSV’s reputation as a groundbreaking health and climate investor in fields ranging from food, agriculture, industrial decarbonization, and AI to therapeutics and diagnostics.
Today, we’re announcing an update to the IndieBio name. It’s been clear for some time, as our excellent teams and facilities in San Francisco and New York City have expanded, that SOSV has been working with many startups that go beyond biology and span broad areas of the deep-tech spectrum from AI to energy to materials. For that reason, we have decided to re-christen those locations SOSV SF and SOSV NY.
Our teams, support, and facilities remain unchanged. The new names are simply an acknowledgement of their broader identity: yes we’re still excited about all things bio, but no less energized about startups working across fields of AI, chemistry, plasma, physics, and more.
On our new Locations page on the SOSV website, you can compare and contrast the SOSV SF and SOSV NY locations as well as SOSV HAX, our Newark, NJ-based third location, which is dedicated to turning hard-tech engineering and science into investable prototypes and commercially exciting companies.
IndieBio will stand out in startup history as one of the most successful tech initiatives to help early stage scientist founders thrive, while also launching major broad-based initiatives in deep tech. We are very grateful to the many SOSV folks, mentors, investors and most of all great founders who made it so, and will continue to make it so under the SOSV SF and SOSV NY brands.
SOSV’s Strategic Vision
The name change for our San Francisco and New York offices is a reflection of SOSV’s emergence as the world’s most sophisticated and active venture investor in pre-seed and early stage deep tech. SOSV, thanks to the body of investments we’ve backed through IndieBio and HAX, often sits on the top of the lists of most active investors put out by Pitchbook, in many deep tech fields, such as manufacturing, life sciences, energy, and human health. We’ve been building this strategic profile for several years, and at the start of 2026 all the parts are harmonizing better than we dreamed.
SOSV General Partner-led teams work 1:1 with our pre-seed founders to speed fundraising of seed and later rounds. Every deep-tech startup is different, and we customize our approach based on their needs. Each of our locations has distinctive strengths, whether that’s the deep investor networks in San Francisco, the hands-on engineering manufacturing services expertise in Newark, or our depth in corporate networks and therapeutics in New York City – and they all collaborate to ensure that our founders get the best of SOSV.
Part of our “best” is 85,000 sq feet of total lab, office, and event space across the three cities, and we will soon launch a fourth, in Princeton, NJ: the HAX Plasma Forge, a project in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), Princeton University, and The New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA). These world-class labs offer equipment to our founders that no other early-stage deep-tech programs have to offer, and we’re grateful stewards of $74 million in public funding that makes them possible.
The seven SOSV General Partners who work in these locations are a dream team of deep and diverse experience across multiple domains; they are engineers, PhDs, scientists, operators, entrepreneurs, and investors. Working alongside them are another 30+ SOSV team members, including nine PhDs. I am in constant communication with our people working in the SOSV sites, and I can tell you that they all share a deep and tireless commitment to work with founders from their pre-seed foundation through to Series A and beyond. No VC works harder or more comprehensively in support of their founders.
On top of that, our founders benefit from SOSV’s tremendous investor network. With an active portfolio of 800+ companies, we have a lot of co-investors – in fact, over 2,700. Beyond that very approachable collection of investors, we have another 7,500+ investors in our network thanks to the formidable event machinery at SOSV, notably our 5x yearly SOSV Founder-VC Matchups. More than 8500 founders and 7000 investors have participated in matchups that include themes across Climate, Robotics, Women’s Health and many more.
The genius of SOSV Matchups is that any founder or VC can participate, which makes them a fantastic data flywheel as well as a huge opportunity for our founders to find new investors. Tim Lichti, founder of Swap Robotics, an SOSV HAX portfolio company, recently noted that the matchups are “by far the most valuable activity SOSV can do for founders post-HAX. These events show why you’re the best VC for early-stage hardware startups.”
The final and most important engine driving SOSV is our mission, the rallying point that holds our close-knit SOSV crew together. We are aiming for the dramatic betterment of human and planetary health, and we believe advanced technologies are essential to get there. There are so many human ailments to address, industries and energy grids to decarbonize, environments to save, dangerous and tedious workplaces to make more worker-friendly, and environments and resources (like water!) to render safer for humans.
We are working across that spectrum with technologies ranging across a wide variety of AI, robotics, industrial chemistry, plasma, biotech, therapeutics, diagnostics, and much more. You can get a good sense of our breadth and commitment from our annual SOSV Deep Tech 100 list.
When it comes to deep tech for human and planetary health, SOSV is primed to make the world a better place, one awesome deep tech founder at a time.
