Developing new medicines from fungi using AI: introducing Tess Bevers, founder of Novogaia

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Fungi have spent millions of years solving human biology. Tess Bevers is building the platform to finally listen.

Tess, founder of Novogaia, is developing new medicines from fungi using AI

• Founder: Tess Bevers - Morgan Stanley sell out turned biotech entrepreneur
• Investment: January 2026
• Thesis: Future of Healthcare
• Conviction: Tess is building a capital efficient AIxBiotech in a unique search space that has 30% higher probability of success in the clinic over traditional therapies
• Obsession: harnessing the power of nature.

What Makes Novogaia Stand Out?

Natural products have historically outperformed synthetic molecules in providing compounds for drug discovery. Fungi-derived compounds show 30% higher probability of success than drugs designed from scratch in a lab. Yet biotech largely abandoned the approach decades ago. The search space was simply too vast -roughly 100 to 200 million fungal molecules waiting to be characterised. The process too slow. The tools too blunt.

Fungi are the most chemically diverse kingdom on Earth: five times more species than plants. Evolutionary pressure has shaped them to interact with human-like biology in ways synthetic chemistry struggles to match. But that advantage is invisible without a way to decode what those molecules actually are. Mass spectrometry could identify fragments, but reconstructing the full structure from spectral data was guesswork. For decades, that bottleneck held.

Two technologies have recently converged.  Mass spectrometry resolution has improved tenfold over the last two decades. And transformer-based machine learning—the same architecture behind large language models— is now accurate enough to predict molecular structures from spectral data. The frontier just opened.

Who’s Building?

Tess Bevers recognised the moment and was determined to move to San Francisco to build in it. She's a technical founder with unrelenting ambition: the kind of person who surrounds herself with people even sharper than herself, and who knows when to step back from a partnership if it's not the fit. She's a first-time builder and doesn't pretend otherwise. What BACKED saw was speed and conviction already pulling remarkable people toward her.

The team is strong. Brad Hover, former head of R&D at Zymergen, took only several months to convince. He's joining as head of research. Tomas Pluskal, a pioneer in both AI and mass spectrometry, is advising. David Pompilano—who ran drug discovery at Merck and GSK and founded companies himself—is guiding the pharma strategy.

Why We Invested in Novogaia

BACKED’s Biotech Investment Manager, Yasmin Siraj, shared why:

What BACKED saw in Tess was someone with the strategic conviction to spot an unmapped chemical frontier and the ambition to move mountains to build in it. She's methodical about bringing a platform like this to market, which means building the pharma relationships most first-time founders lack. That combination of vision, execution discipline, and respect for the problem is rare this early.

Fungi represent one of the last great unmapped chemical territory in drug discovery, and that the convergence of better mass spectrometry and transformer-based AI makes it possible to navigate systematically for the first time.

Novogaia's first target is an innate immunity pathway involved in inflammatory disease. Pharma has already validated it: assets are in Phase 1. But the synthetic drugs being tested face a narrow therapeutic window—inhibit the pathway too much and you cause toxicity. Fungi, having evolved to live symbiotically in human bodies, have learned to modulate that exact balance. A fungal molecule should hit it more precisely, with fewer side effects and better dosing options. That's not speculation. It's evolutionary logic applied to pharmacology. And if the thesis holds for one target, Tess has access to a chemical library vast enough to explore hundreds more.

The capital efficiency is compelling. Rather than designing molecules from first principles, Novogaia uses its AI to sift the fungal kingdom for ones that work. The cost of discovery drops by 40%. The probability of clinical success rises by 30%. The search space is so large and so chemically diverse that defensibility compounds naturally: proprietary spectral data, structure-activity relationships linked to fungal strains, and patented lead compounds accumulate with each drug developed.

On Being BACKED:

Since joining the portfolio, Tess has immersed herself into the BACKED community - joining us at our inaugural Unwritten event on building culture in Europe, and attending the BACKED Founder Retreat 2026. She's making the most of it before heading to San Francisco to build.

Tess joins BACKED's brilliant biotech founders building the future of healthcare. Among them: Jack O'Meara at Aerska (and founder of Ochre Bio), Liisi Laaniste and  Lowai Muhammed at Cosyne Therapeutics, Rabia Khan at Serna Bio, and James Dacombe at CoMind -  to name just a few.

We're backing Tess and the entire fungal kingdom she's about to unlock. 🏴‍☠️

Follow Tess' story.

Explore Novogaia.

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