San Francisco, USA, 4th October 2016 / Sciad Newswire / Fifty Years is a new VC fund based in Silicon Valley that funds entrepreneurs using technology to solve the world’s biggest problems. Like a traditional VC fund, Fifty Years looks for companies with the potential to turn into massive businesses. Unlike most, it also looks for companies that, if successful, will solve a major world problem.

“We’re not interested in solving problems like reducing enterprise customer churn, or pairing people with the perfect pair of shoes, or ensuring someone can get sushi with the click of a button” says Fifty Years Founding Partner Seth Bannon. “We’re looking for startups tackling big problems. Solving the climate crisis. Defeating disease. Feeding the world. Educating everyone. The thesis of our fund is that these companies will be the most valuable over the next decade, and that it will be increasingly hard for companies not solving the big problems to compete.”

Fifty Years uses the UN’s Millennium Sustainable Development Goals as a rubric for whether a startup is solving a real, systemic problem. Unlike traditional “impact investors”, who might be perfectly happy funding a cash flow business in Kenya, Fifty Years only backs technology-enabled high growth companies with the potential for massive capital return.

Fifty Years Founding Partner Ela Madej expressed frustration with the current state of entrepreneurship: “There is so much capital flowing to technology that essentially tricks people into buying more stuff they don’t need. It’s very disappointing.” By focusing only on startups solving real problems and showing those companies will also be the most valuable, Fifty Years hopes to change the narrative of business.

Fifty Years was announced at the SynBioBeta synthetic biology conference in South San Francisco, where Founding Partner Seth Bannon was speaking. Fifty Years has invested in a range of syn bio startups shaping the world for the better — from a company engineering microbes to produce industrial chemicals sustainably, to a company automating lab work with robots, to a company culturing meat to eat.

"One of the reasons we're excited about synthetic biology is that the costs in the space have been dropping pretty radically over the last 5 to 10 years," says Bannon. "We're seeing something very similar to what we saw in software a couple of decades ago and what we saw in hardware 10 years ago. Where it will soon be possible for someone to get a synthetic biology company up and off the ground, funded off their credit card, from their garage."

Fifty Years was founded by two Y Combinator alumni and entrepreneurs Seth Bannon and Ela Madej, who are also the co-founders of impact.tech. Fifty Years has a portfolio of 18 companies.

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For more information, visit FIfty Years’ website www.fifty.vc or email hello@fifty.vc