Kanvas Biosciences: One Week Deadline Reminder

Red Bear Ventures Community:

Just a quick reminder that all commitments for the Kanvas Biosciences deal must be in by Thursday, July 31st at 5pm ET.  If you'd like to consider investing, please follow the AngelList link below (deal memo and IRR analysis hosted in AngelList data room): 

https://portal.angellist.com/l/dr/059e043e

For those of you who could not attend the 7/11 webinar with CEO, Matt Cheng, you can find a recording of the webinar here. The password for the recording is RBV2025! and you can see the company's slide presentation here.

Thanks!

Dan and Gus

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[Sent 07/11/25]

Red Bear Ventures Community:

Thanks to those of you who joined today's webinar with Kanvas Bio's Co-Founder & CEO, Matt Cheng. The group had some great questions and we loved seeing all of the back and forth discussion.

For those of you who could not attend, you can find a recording of the webinar here. The password for the recording is RBV2025! and you can see the company's slide presentation here.

If you'd like to consider investing, please follow the AngelList link below:

https://portal.angellist.com/l/dr/059e043e

This link will allow you to join the Red Bear Ventures syndicate on AngelList, where you will be prompted to set up an investor account (if you do not already have one).

From there, you can review the Kanvas Bio deal specifics (deal memo, IRR analysis, etc.) and choose whether or not to invest. All commitments must be made by 5pm ET on Thursday July 31st.

The minimum investment is $5000. 

If you choose to participate, you will be prompted to a) submit evidence of your accreditation status to AngelList and b) fund your AngelList funding account to fund your commitment. 

More detail on the accreditation process can be found here. If you have any questions as it pertains to the AngelList-specific steps outlined above, please reach out directly to the AngelList LP Relations Team: lp-relations@angellist.com.

If you have any questions about the company or the investment opportunity, please don't hesitate to reach out to us.

Thanks!

Dan and Gus

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[Sent 07/01/25]

Hello Red Bear Ventures Community!

We are excited to present an investment opportunity in Kanvas Biosciences' Series A financing. Kanvas Biosciences is a well-capitalized biotech company poised to transform microbiome drug screening, drug discovery, and therapeutic development across multiple diseases.

The company’s overview deck is here. Deal podcast is here (generated by Google Notebook LLM; ~20 minutes).

We have scheduled a Zoom webinar with Kanvas Bio’s Co-founder and CEO, Matt Cheng, for Friday, July 11th at 12:30pm ET. If you’d like to attend the webinar, simply reply to this email and we’ll add you to the calendar invite.

The company has raised over $50M to date inclusive of the current $25M Series A (90%+ subscribed). The proceeds of this round will be used primarily to fund drug manufacturing, clinical trials, platform development, and the launch of several biomarker discovery partnerships. The company is capitalized by leading venture capital firms, including DCVC, Lions Capital (managed by Paul Theunissen), Germin8 Ventures, Pangaea Ventures, Ki Tua Fund, Triple Impact Capital, Uncommon Denominator, Cooke LLC, and FemHealth Ventures.

We are excited about the investment opportunity for multiple reasons:

Targeting the Microbiome

The human microbiome, a vast ecosystem of microbial cells, is vital to human health, influencing digestion, immune system regulation, metabolism, and even neurological processes. Disruptions in this ecosystem are implicated in numerous chronic diseases, including cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disorders.

While therapeutic approaches leveraging the microbiome have shown promise, they have historically faced significant challenges in consistency, scalability, and safety - and the field generally has been missing a deeper understanding of disease mechanisms and host-microbiome interactions.

A Multi-Faceted and IP-Protected Solution

Kanvas Biosciences is solving these critical challenges with two technological breakthroughs:

(1) Spatial Biology Platform (“Google Maps for the Microbiome”): This pioneering and difficult-to-replicate technology provides high-resolution imaging, uncovering host-microbiome interactions and identifying precise therapeutic targets. 

(2) Manufacturing Breakthrough, Anaerobic Co-culture Technology (ACT): Kanvas' patented manufacturing approach ensures reproducible manufacturing of complex “consortia” mirroring the "normal" gut microbiome, setting a new industry standard.

Business Model Optionality

Kanvas is pursuing a dual-track business model and is seeing product-market fit along both tracks.  First, it is developing its own drugs (details below). Second, it is making its system available to other biotech companies, both for drug discovery and biomarker discovery. Examples of product-market fit for this second path include a recent agreement with a top-10 pharmaceutical company to develop a novel assay to study different drugs against TB and a large animal health company to develop a canine microbiome therapeutic.

Robust Therapeutic Pipeline and De-risked Clinical Pathway

Kanvas is pursuing two drugs in the near-term:

• KAN-001 (Immunotherapy Resistant Cancers): As outlined in this NBC News article, the company’s lead drug candidate is targeting immunotherapy-resistant cancers and has demonstrated strong results in multiple mouse models across four tumor types (melanoma, colorectal, breast, sarcoma). KAN-001 is set to advance to first-in-human studies for ICI-refractory cancer treatment with preliminary Phase 1 results targeted by the end of 2026. Its clinical development path is further supported by positive FDA feedback, and it has performed equivalent to or better than “super donors” in mouse models.

• KAN-004 (Immunotherapy-induced Colitis): This drug was proven safe in human Phase 1 trials involving healthy volunteers. Preliminary data showed durable engraftment and no significant adverse events. Related data from the company’s collaborators at MD Anderson Cancer Center suggests incredibly high success rates (>80%) among patients with refractory colitis who are treated with healthy donor FMT and Kanvas expects similarly high success rates (if not higher) with KAN-004. Clinical trials for KAN-004 are moving to first-in-human trials for ICI-induced colitis with preliminary data anticipated by the beginning of 2026.

Significant Market Opportunity

Kanvas Bio's platform is oriented to address substantial long-term addressable markets while optimizing for near-term commercialization opportunities.

• The immuno-oncology market exceeds $125 billion in sales. Over 600,000 patients in the U.S. could eventually be eligible for KAN-001 annually.

• Kanvas targets the $10 billion microbiome-relevant segment of R&D budgets within the US pharmaceutical industry, with a clear path to expand meaningfully to new microbiome therapies and new product categories.

• The platform presents expansion opportunities into diagnostics, “technology as a research tool”, “ACT as an industry service”, and other ventures in agriculture, nutritional science, and animal health. 

Exceptional Leadership Team

Kanvas is led by a highly accomplished, multi-disciplinary life sciences team. CEO Matt Cheng (Harvard-trained infectious diseases specialist) and CTO Hao Shi (Cornell-trained physicist and developer of the core visualization platform) co-founded the company with Iwijn De Vlaminck, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University and Chair of Kanvas’ Scientific Advisory Board.

Revenue Outlook & Potential Valuation/Exit

The aforementioned deal with the large animal health company is expected to generate significant revenue for Kanvas in the near future, which will significantly reduce its need to raise future venture capital.

We believe the most realistic exit strategy for Kanvas is an IPO ($1B+ valuation) after demonstrating the clinical benefits of KAN-001 and KAN-004. 

The fallback plan would be to split Kanvas into a therapeutics and a spatial biology company, and to further grow each entity individually. From a therapeutics vantage point, the company would leverage their first-in-category manufacturing capabilities to further develop live biotherapeutic products in other verticals, including in human (e.g. probiotics) and animal health (e.g. for companion animals and/or livestock) for which they already have significant traction. From a spatial biology perspective, they would leverage their unique ability to profile rRNA, mRNA, and proteins across both mammalian and microbial cells into a service model for academic labs, as well as for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.

Summary

Kanvas Biosciences represents a unique opportunity to invest in a company with transformative technology, a de-risked clinical pipeline, and a highly capable team positioned to revolutionize microbiome therapeutics and beyond.

We will distribute the Kanvas Bio investment link via AngelList after the webinar, and the syndicate will close on Thursday, July 31st at 5pm ET.

Again, please respond to this email if you’d like to join the July 11th webinar. The zoom invite will come from dan@redbear.vc.   

Thanks, everyone - have a terrific rest of your week!

Dan and Gus

Red Bear Ventures (RBV) is a community-first investment platform which invests exclusively in companies founded by, or managed by, the students, faculty, staff, and alumni of Cornell University, one of the world’s most innovative and entrepreneurial universities. RBV invests across stages and verticals and syndicates investment opportunities to the RBV community via special purpose vehicles (SPVs). RBV is an independent platform wholly managed by its Managing Partners - it is neither affiliated with, nor endorsed by, Cornell University.

More information can be found at www.redbear.vc.

Red Bear Ventures is a service mark used under license from its owner, Red Bear Angels Management LLC, which operates the angel group, Red Bear Angels. Please see www.RBAngels.com for information.