ABOUT ASTERA
Build fearlessly, learn openly
Outsized returns come from neglected ideas.
Long-term innovation happens by thinking about what is possible in the future. This process is messy and uncertain. As a result, many high potential ideas are often passed over. We believe that neglected ideas have the most potential for outsized returns.
Astera supports promising innovators during their earliest stages of exploration. We encourage rapid experimentation to inform better theories. We accept risk and partial information. Our intention is to help develop new ideas before they are attractive to most funders and nurture the promising ones towards independence.
Astera also prioritizes parallel technological or field-building efforts that can increase the impact and opportunity space for innovators. Solving hard problems requires community engagement in broad experimentation and learning.
Institute Leadership
Jed McCaleb is the founder of the Astera Institute. His focus is on accelerating progress, expanding potential, and increasing net happiness. He is also co-founder and Chief Architect of the Stellar Development Foundation, the organization that maintains the open-source Stellar Network.
Seemay is a scientist, Pew Scholar, co-founder and CEO at Arcadia Science, chairperson of The Navigation Fund, and forever-Texan at heart. She received a PhD in Molecular Cell Biology from UC Berkeley and served as a professor at UC San Francisco.
Cate Hall is Astera’s CEO. She’s a former Supreme Court attorney and the ex-No. 1 female poker player in the world. Before joining Astera, she co-founded and served as COO and later co-CEO of Alvea, a pandemic medicine company that set the record for the fastest startup to take a drug candidate to Phase I clinical trial. She received a BS in biochemistry and BA in philosophy from the University of Arizona, and a law degree from Yale Law School.
Anika Gupta is Astera’s COO. Anika started as a generalist at the Boston Consulting Group and KKR before leading Strategy and Operations for R&D at Solugen. She received SB’s in Materials Science and Engineering and in Management at MIT, where she also served as class president. She received her MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
John Wilbanks is Astera’s Head of Data. He is a longtime advocate of informed consent, open science, and research networks and has served as Head of Data at Biogen Digital Health, Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks, VP of Science at Creative Commons, and co-founder of the Access2Research campaign for public access to publicly funded data and literature.
See indirect costs policy here.