AI longevity biotech startup EonArk raises two rounds in one month, with Unity Ventures leading seed+ round | Unity Ventures portfolio
Oxford PhD Launches Startup, Using Data, AI, and Biotechnology to Explore the Future of Longevity and Health
AI biotech company EonArk today announced it had completed seed and seed+ funding rounds within a single month, raising nearly RMB 100 million in total. The seed+ round was led by Unity Ventures, with participation from Monolith, Boyu Capital, and Xinglian Capital.
EonArk is using artificial intelligence to restructure biotech R&D pathways, building a Longevity Foundation Model oriented toward bioscience and life sciences. The model learns from cross-species, cross-organ single-cell and multi-omics data to establish a R&D system spanning biological mechanism understanding, target discovery, and experimental validation.
Founder and CEO Simiao Zhao holds a PhD in AI for drug discovery from Oxford University. CTO Jingkun Zeng conducted postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley under Nobel laureate in Chemistry Jennifer Doudna.
Unity Ventures believes EonArk has built high technical barriers in cross-species anti-aging target algorithms and delivery technology, enabling the team to continuously expand into new targets and novel anti-aging therapeutic approaches. Founder Simiao Zhao has maintained years of focused commitment to the anti-aging field, assembling a professional team of senior technical experts and industry executives with strong industry resource integration capabilities and leadership.
Basic research in anti-aging continues to break through, with numerous targets and multiple technological approaches moving from the laboratory to industrial implementation. Unity Ventures remains bullish on the commercial value and significant social importance of the anti-aging field, paying attention to investment opportunities across different technological approaches.
On humanity's quest for "immortality," another young company has joined the race.
Choosing to start his entrepreneurial journey before completing his doctorate, 27-year-old Simiao Zhao and UC Berkeley postdoc Jingkun Zeng founded AI-powered anti-aging drug R&D company EonArk in Shenzhen two months ago.
Believing that death is merely an engineering problem, they plan to explore a future of healthy longevity through cross-species aging research, using data, AI, and biotechnology — with the goal of helping people live healthily past 130.
This unimaginably ambitious target has captured investors' attention. In less than a month, EonArk completed two consecutive funding rounds at a valuation reaching several hundred million yuan.
On July 17, EonArk completed a seed+ round of tens of millions of yuan, led by Unity Ventures with follow-on investments from Monolith, Boyu Capital, and Xinglian Capital. Shortly before, the company had also completed a seed round of tens of millions of yuan, led by Monolith with participation from Unity Ventures, Boyu Capital, and Guokr.
With investor backing, the company is accelerating its development. According to their plans, this round's proceeds will primarily fund pipeline R&D, AI system construction, and team building.
Oxford PhD Turned Founder, Two Rounds in One Month
EonArk was born from Simiao Zhao's childhood dream — "immortality."
This "impossible" idea in outsiders' eyes took root during Zhao's childhood. Born in 1998 in Chongqing, his name was given by his grandfather, inspired by Tang Dynasty physician Sun Simiao. "The last thing my grandfather said to me was that he didn't want to die."
From age seven or eight, he began searching for answers to "why do people have to die." Combined with family expectations that he study medicine and his own interest in artificial intelligence, these factors profoundly shaped Zhao's life trajectory.
After graduating from the University of Edinburgh with a degree in artificial intelligence, he pursued his master's and PhD at Oxford University researching aging. He not only co-founded the Oxford Aging and Longevity Society but also joined the nonprofit Longevity Biotech Fellowship, dedicated to "solving aging."
During his studies, Zhao learned about the longevity escape velocity hypothesis — if technology extends lifespan faster than the human body ages, humans could theoretically achieve far longer lifespans than currently possible. This made him realize that death is not an inevitable law of nature, but an engineering problem.
Sharing this belief was UC Berkeley postdoc Jingkun Zeng, who studied under CRISPR gene editing inventor and Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna. Their similar perspectives on aging research brought them together, planting the seeds for their future entrepreneurial partnership.
As AI for Bio gradually became a hot trend, and with mounting research confirming that intervention in certain pathways can systematically improve multiple organ functions in aged animals, they recognized that China possesses a mature biopharmaceutical industry chain. They judged that anti-aging drug development had entered a stage where it could be advanced through engineering approaches.
In May 2026, with his doctorate nearing completion, Zhao and Zeng founded EonArk in Shenzhen, planning to explore healthy longevity through cross-species aging research using data, AI, and biotechnology. They believe that aging is not an outcome that can only be waited for, but a complex system that can be observed, modeled, and intervened upon.
"Simply put, we want to use artificial intelligence and real animal experiments to break aging down from something everyone thinks is an unsolvable fate into an engineering problem that can be verified and intervened upon," Zhao stated directly. EonArk hopes to use AI-driven drug discovery to restore the physiological functions of aged biological individuals to levels equivalent to young individuals.
This ambitious goal has attracted talent from top institutions including Oxford, Berkeley, Cambridge, and Imperial College London. Beyond covering computational biology, gene editing, structural biology, and medicinal chemistry, EonArk's core team includes six Oxford PhDs who have published more than ten papers in top-tier journals including Nature and Science.
In the view of Unity Ventures founder Xiao Wang, Zhao has maintained years of dedicated focus and commitment to the anti-aging field, demonstrating high foresight and long-term thinking. "Through his understanding of the industry and pragmatic, deep engagement, he has successfully assembled a professional team of senior technical experts and industry executives with extremely strong industry resource integration capabilities and leadership."
From its inception, the company chose to enter through pet pharmaceuticals while simultaneously developing lifespan-extending drugs for humans. The rationale: pets with shorter lifespans have genuine needs and allow drug efficacy to be observed in the near term.
Through integrated human-and-pet drug design, EonArk aims to bridge the two using cross-species data. Their thinking: first run the full drug development process through with pets, accumulating real-world data while reverse-driving human drug pipelines.
This approach rests on the premise that human and pet aging mechanisms are sufficiently conserved — meaning the core genes driving aging are shared across species. With their developed H2P (Human-to-Pet) cross-species transfer learning model, they use domain-adaptive neural networks to capture conserved aging features from single-cell transcriptome data, concluding that cross-species conservation holds at the broad level.
Recognizing the team and technology, Unity Ventures, Monolith, Boyu Capital, Guokr, and Xinglian Capital moved decisively, becoming EonArk's shareholders in rapid succession within a month.
"Basic research in anti-aging continues to break through, with numerous targets and multiple technological approaches moving from the laboratory to industrial implementation," Wang stated directly. EonArk has built strong technical barriers in cross-species anti-aging target algorithms and delivery technology, supporting the team's continued expansion into new targets and novel anti-aging therapeutic approaches.
With the seed+ round closed, this recently founded startup has reached a valuation of several hundred million yuan.
Battling Death with AI, Toward Healthy Lifespans Past 130
With nearly RMB 100 million in funding secured, EonArk's development has further accelerated.
Since founding, the company has built out its AI team, drug team, and precision health department in just two months. Specifically, the AI team uses interpretable machine learning to identify multi-gene combinations, narrowing the search space for anti-aging drugs; the drug team then advances drug development and efficacy validation based on AI-screened targets.
"For cross-species lifespan extension needs and age-related diseases including arthritis, pancreatitis, and chronic kidney disease, our drug team is advancing eight pipelines," Zhao revealed. Their pipelines don't bet on single targets but cover multiple core signaling pathways related to aging, meaning broader target and mechanism coverage.
Among these pipelines, ARK-001 and ARK-002 for cross-species lifespan extension are more advanced. ARK-001 establishes efficacy models around age-related fibrosis, metabolic, and inflammatory phenotypes in dogs and cats while preserving human drug translation potential; ARK-002, targeting another classic aging-related pathway, has already received Chinese invention patent protection.
Currently, EonArk is in discussions with multiple top domestic and international pharmaceutical companies regarding collaborations including joint disease model development and pipeline licensing. Their plan: beyond providing pet lifespan extension products, they will partner with pharmaceutical companies to co-develop specific pipelines. In these early stages, the precision health department will serve as the company's commercial entry point.
By collecting pets' ages, examination indicators, disease histories, living conditions, and follow-up results, their precision health department builds a long-term aging database. In practice, this database's data supports not only pet drug R&D but also AI model iteration and human drug translation assessments.
As aging research deepens, EonArk's goals have shifted from "simply extending lifespan" to "functional reversal" — ultimately enabling biological individuals to have extremely long lifespans while aged organs regain function or remain healthy for extended periods.
In their view, lifespan extension without mobility or with frailty is meaningless. More critically, by examining indicators including exercise capacity, metabolic status, inflammation levels, organ fibrosis, and DNA methylation, it's possible to determine whether a biological individual's aging state has genuinely improved, thereby assessing anti-aging drugs' actual efficacy.
Per EonArk's planning, the company aims to first extend biological individuals' lifespans by roughly 30%, then continuously seek methods to maintain youthful states long-term. "For example, extending the lives of dogs with average lifespans of 12-15 years by 3-5 more years; we strive to achieve similar proportional healthy lifespan improvements in humans in the future, helping people live healthily past 130," Zhao added.
This is a vision full of imagination but also extreme challenge.
Technology, funding, ethics, and policy are all hurdles EonArk must overcome. In Zhao's view, technology has made solid progress toward extending lifespan and reversing aging, but gaining public acceptance and policy support is more difficult than developing drugs.
Yet they remain optimistic. The company judges that if pet lifespan-extending drugs successfully reach market and prove effective, the public will gradually come to accept that aging is reversible. "After public perception shifts, policy can follow, attracting large-scale capital inflow."
For EonArk, their ultimate hope is to use AI to defeat death — through continuous struggle against mortality, until everyone has the right to choose their own manner of death.
Source: ChinaVenture
Author: Zhigao Lu
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