fifty years

For researchers, reading scientific papers can be immensely time-consuming. According to one survey, scientists spend seven hours each week searching for information. Another survey suggests that syst

The real estate industry is a bit of a greenhouse gas powerhouse, responsible for 40% of all global emissions. A quarter of that comes from building materials, and Tangible has had enough. The compan

If you’ve ever spent time writing beat poetry about container ships chugging their way into and out of harbors, “nimble” or “fast” will be unlikely to make it into your f

Vegetable oils like canola and palm oil have become a major part of our diet, whether we like it or not, and while they’re useful substances, they’re not exactly good for you and are a maj

Malnutrition is very common among hospitalized patients in the U.S., and its coded prevalence is increasing. Amid this problem lies an opportunity to optimize the overall quality of patient care, impr

There are lots of startups now working on modular home design. Among the most interesting is Cover, a seven-year-old, LA-based company that says it manufactures fully complete wall, floor and roof pan

Fifty Years, a six-year-old, San Francisco-based outfit with a portfolio that’s already rife with mostly deep tech companies — many with a good story to tell about how they can have an imp

Its proprietary fermentation process will enable QOA to scale production by 2035 and be able to price its "chocolate" products the same or below the cost of traditional chocolate.

Psychedelics companies are all the rage right now. Compass Pathways is working with the magic mushroom compound psilocybin to treat depression. It’s has raised $290 million in total. Atai Life Scien

In 2017, Paul Hawken published a book (Drawdown) compiling a set of concrete actions people could take to combat climate change. Inspired by this, Seth Bannon, founding partner at Fifty Years, a firm

Faction Technology founder and CEO Ain McKendrick didn’t have the $1 billion or the time that a typical automotive program might need to design and manufacture an EV that could be used for drive

You might have thought that with more than 300 companies joining this year’s winter batch of Y Combinator, the investor interest might have thinned. Well, it’s 2021 and investors are hopping aroun

Not every company’s founders find themselves on a first-name basis with the local bomb squad, but then again not every company is Noya Labs, which wants to turn the roughly 2 million cooling tow

ReturnSafe, a symptom checking and contact tracing employee health management toolkit for businesses, has raised $3.25 million in financing from investors including Fifty Years and Active Capital.  W

It’s too soon to know who will win the U.S. election tomorrow. Tomorrow may even be too soon to know who wins the election. But it’s always a good time to talk with investors about how the

Daniel Arlow has spent the last eighteen years studying genomics and synthetic biology. The arc of his career has taken the first-time founder of the new startup Ansa Biotechnologies from MIT to the f

During this week’s Democratic debate, there was a lot of talk, unsurprisingly, about ensuring the future of this country’s children and grandchildren. Climate change was of particular inte

The age of alternative meats is upon us.  Beyond Meat is a $5 billion public company selling burgers in Canadian McDonald’s and American Carl’s Jr., breakfast sausages in Dunkin, and even

As the technologies that were once considered science fiction become the purview of science, the venture capital firms that were once investing at the industry’s fringes are now finding themselv

Solugen, a startup that has set itself up with no less lofty a goal than the decarbonization of a massive chunk of the petrochemical industry, may be the first legitimate multi-million-dollar company