VDP-129 [Assessment]: Vitalia - a city that builds longevity companies

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One-liner: Vitalia.city is a city that accelerates the development of longevity biotech.

# Simple Summary

Vitalia.city is a movement to start a longevity network city. The city will be distributed into 3-5 hubs in different special economic zones. In these hubs, we build companies and work on the technology and science to make death optional.

The MVP is a 2-month “pop-up city”, like Zuzalu.city. With the upcoming gathering, we aim to give people a taste of what it’s like to live in close proximity with 200+ like-minded people for 2 months, with the goal of having 20+ permanent residents stay over and incubate 10-15 new companies/projects.

The upcoming pop-up city is happening between Jan 6 - Mar 1, 2024 on the Caribbean island of Roatán, with one of the districts being in the Próspera Special Economic Zone, where clinical trials can be run orders of magnitude faster and cheaper.

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# Problem

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There are formidable barriers to bringing potential medicines to market. Progress is strangulated by over-regulation. Animal models are not good predictive models. Instead of Moore’s Law, we have the inverse, Eroom’s Law (coined by Jack Scannell; Nature paper)

# Opportunity

VitaDAO is an online network, but we cannot give people online drugs. We need locations for faster trials. Semi-autonomous zones for an in-person community to govern itself, trying a better regulatory framework, where self-experimentation is allowed, enabling potential treatments (that are stuck in the 10+ year-long approval pipeline) to save millions of lives.

This is paramount for achieving longevity escape velocity within 1-3 decades.

Creating new cities is a bold vision. A world-class medical innovation zone is desirable for host countries, providing win-win economics.

The return profile is unprecedented.

Longevity already is a $tn opportunity by itself, with Vitalia capturing equity value primarily as an accelerator for new companies.

The value-add for the incubated companies is the location (land value appreciation) and the community (token economy).

The land upside has a venture-scale return profile but with downside protection. Vitalia will own cheap land and differential upside on sub-leasing (in places like Próspera).

Initially, the funds will be held in one “mothership” entity that focuses on 1) community development, 2) company acceleration, and 3) land & jurisdictional business development.

As Vitalia grows, it will create two more entities for the different risk profiles: a) a VC fund and B) a real estate and land development fund (similar to Próspera). It will also act as a service provider, capturing up to 7% of each district’s governance token (similar to Molecule)

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# Relevance to longevity

Providing a “warp speed” pathway for longevity therapeutics will radically accelerate progress toward achieving extended healthy human lifespans for all.

# Financing

Vitalia is raising a $1M pre-seed round at a $10M post-money valuation cap via a SAFE note, and has reserved up to $200K for the VitaDAO community.

# Additional information

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This seems like a great idea, and an interesting way to implement the ‘network state’ idea.

I do not understand how the implementation would work, however. What would the 20 permanent residents do? Would they be employed by these companies they incubate? Or is this for financially independent people?

Where would the lab work be done? Or is the plan to outsource to CROs in the US? Would there be extra challenges in protecting the IP?

Is the Caribbean cheap enough where $1M will make a dent in buying/leasing real estate? Thought lab facilities in the US run 40-100M to build. Getting the needed talent to relocate to the Caribbean may be a challenge, especially if there’s no lab space.

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Hi there, one of the co-founders here - thanks for the great questions!

There is a lot of work we did over the past 18 months that went into it so it’s hard to put all that into a short proposal, a couple of comments:

  • 20 residents & 10 new companies is the proof-point for the first MVP, it’s just the beginning to seed the initial community (we’ll raise subsequent rounds after)

  • For the initial residents, we’re targeting entrepreneurs and founders i.e. they can figure things out on their own and would then bring people to employ or source locally

  • We have one clinic that can perform the function of a CRO. It can do approx. 20 early-stage clinical trials per year (has IRB too and trials can be continued in other jurisdictions); a different company is building clinical and CRO capacity out further, and even manufacturing will be possible there

  • We don’t buy real estate from money from the pre-seed round; this is just to a) seed the initial community via starting a pop-up city, and b) do business development for 2-4 more jurisdictions

  • Relocating talent is not as hard as you think once you’ve seen the place:) It’s a tropical paradise and the beginning of a community that builds a new city with a futuristic vibe, like Dubai on day 1 (just in a much better initial location in terms of weather and geography)

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Sounds awesome! Looking forward to relocating one day.

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