Bio

Gwen Cheni is the cofounder of a stealth startup in AI and biology. She was previously a Partner on the investment team at Khosla Ventures, and a Partner at IndieBio/SOSV covering bio and AI. Prior to IndieBio, Gwen was the founder and Managing Partner of Galapagos Ventures, an early stage venture fund focused on the intersection of biology and AI/ML. She was an early investor in SyntheX, Intrinsic Medicine, and Huue. Prior to Galapagos Ventures, she was a Director at StudioX (machine learning venture studio funded by Shell and Boston Consulting Group) and a Venture Partner at Fusion Fund (early stage fund focused on AI/ML, robotics and devices). Gwen was on the Board of Advisors at Singularity University Ventures, an impact-focused accelerator, and helped launch their first batch of startups in the Nordics. Prior to venture, Gwen spent eighteen years on Wall Street investing in public equities, started her career at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and was promoted to portfolio manager at a $300 million innovation-themed hedge fund. Gwen is bilingual in computer science programming languages and wet lab research protocols. On the computer science side, she received her bachelor’s degree in economics (math track) with a minor in computer science electrical engineering from Yale University. One of her four MBA concentrations from the University of Chicago was econometrics/statistical learning. She has completed all sixteen machine learning certification courses by DeepLearning.ai, all four reinforcement learning courses by the University of Alberta, and six genomic data science courses via Johns Hopkins. On the wet lab biology side, Gwen spent two years at UCSF researching immunotherapy for glioblastomas, and was second author on two publications. She spent summers researching x-ray protein crystallography, nitric oxide as an oncology therapeutic, and image recognition of breast cancer histology. She currently sits on the Advisory Board of the Yale University School of Medicine. Gwen is the author of a chapter in a Physics textbook on lasers, second author on two publications in immuno-oncology, and co-owner of a patent on magnetic resonance.