mRNA pioneer and founder turned investor Carina Namih joins Plural

I’m really happy to announce that Carina Namih has joined Khaled, Sten, Taavet and me at Plural as a peer. She’s been a founder, a CEO, an investor and she has a deep and considered view on how to direct technology and build companies for positive impact.

At Plural we are building a platform for serious founders to put capital, experience and energy behind important missions. Carina is the perfect example of someone who does that.

Carina’s path to becoming a founder started when a member of her family became seriously ill. At 22, she bought a copy of the foundational biology textbook The Cell, read it cover to cover, quit her job, moved from London to San Francisco and committed to founding a company that could make a difference. Along with her co-founders she zeroed in on applying AI to RNA-based medicine and founded HelixNano. 

This was back in 2013, before Covid made the rest of us aware of how important RNA vaccines could be. We believe that non-obvious, hard companies matter, and the BioNTech founders are one of the inspirations we cite on our homepage. It feels so exciting that another RNA pioneer like Carina is joining us. 

What is even more unbelievable about Carina and her co-founder Hannu’s story is that neither of them were insiders. In general starting a biotech company has one dominant path whereby a biotech VC partners with a distinguished academic lab and brings in seasoned managers from the industry. Being a veteran insider is critical to getting off the ground. Carina and Hannu had none of the usual advantages, just vision, intelligence, will and scrappiness. Sometimes, to break new ground in a field, it takes an outsider. 

Fast forward ten years and HelixNano is on the cusp of becoming a truly remarkable company. With their computationally driven approach, they have quietly solved the technical bottlenecks that keep first generation RNA confined to vaccines.Their next-generation platform outperforms Moderna’s by over 10x in trials, in terms of tolerable dose and immune response. Passing these thresholds means that essentially any biologic drug, including cancer drugs, can be turned into RNA and produced in the human body, with the same kind of speed, scalability and cost curves we have seen with COVID vaccines. 

It’s hard to exaggerate how significant this could be - transforming cancer treatment and turning the tide against infectious diseases. HelixNano is now focussed on developing vaccines and cancer immunotherapies that were impossible with previous generation RNA. The company plans to move out of stealth mode with announcements coming later this year. 

This kind of hard tech, science driven, company, is a long, hard slog. To put in context, the first generation RNA companies like BioNTech and Moderna have been 18 years in the making. 

Back in 2012, Carina had to be unbelievably scrappy, hustling money and support from industry partnerships, grants - anything. HelixNano had an ambitious, difficult mission that most people didn't understand or recognise. Eventually they found visionary investors, outside of the traditional biotech circles - Eric Schmidt, 50 Years, Sam Altman, etc - who recognised their potential as founders and the importance of their mission. The company is now backed by a broad base of Silicon Valley’s top investors.

These are the kinds of missions we are here for all day at Plural - our view is that with someone like Carina in their corner, the next visionary, contrarian founder can use shortcuts to tackle important missions.

One thing I really admire about Carina’s journey with HelixNano is that several years in, she had the realness to acknowledge she wasn’t the right CEO for the next phase and handed that role over to her co-founder Hannu - staying involved as a co-founder and board member. All of us at Plural know that leaving the start-up you founded triggers a bit of an identity crisis - you’ve merged your identity so much with a single mission it takes a while to find what’s next.

Carina’s version of decompression was to start working with founders as an investor. She’s gone on to invest in some of the UK’s fastest growing and most exciting companies, including Omnipresent, Phasecraft and Robin. I got to know Carina through the Phasecraft board that I Chair. I was struck by the wisdom and judgment she brought to an extremely challenging mission - making the first useful application of a quantum computer.

What most struck me about Carina was the extreme response she provoked in one of the Phasecraft co-founders. He spent 3 hours with Carina and afterwards basically said he wouldn’t really consider any investment syndicate that didn’t allow for her to be involved - he saw her depth of experience in building a hard tech company and bringing cutting edge science out of the lab, and was utterly convinced she’d be a huge advantage to the company. 

The core premise of Plural is that serious founders and operators have unique scar tissue that they can bring to important missions. Carina’s scar tissue from HelixNano spans so many areas and is not something the typical spreadsheet crunching VC can draw upon. 

Our hope with Plural is to make a significant contribution to the role European start-ups play in shaping our future. We believe Carina is the perfect example of someone who can do that with us and are so excited she’s joining as a peer.