Kerna Ventures

Kerna Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm based in London, United Kingdom, investing in advanced therapeutic platform technologies. Its thesis centers on genome engineering, cell and gene therapy, non-viral and targeted delivery systems (including blood-brain barrier shuttles and polymer nanoparticles), epigenome editing, cell reprogramming, and computational/in silico biology applied to drug discovery. The firm backs founders emerging from academic research, with a portfolio skewed toward university spinouts (e.g. from UC Berkeley, University College London, and University of Maryland) building platform companies in genetic medicine rather than single-asset biotechs. It invests from Seed through Series B, writing checks reported in the range of $500K to $5M, and is described as academia-rooted and geography-agnostic rather than tied to a single region. Portfolio companies are typically pre-clinical or early-clinical platform plays validated by peer-reviewed science, academic pedigree of founding teams, and in some cases large pharma partnerships. Founders can reach the firm via email listed on its website.