Geoffrey Maltzahn

Geoffrey von Maltzahn (born July 22, 1980, in Arlington, Texas) is an American biological engineer, serial entrepreneur, and investor. He grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, and graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. He earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from MIT (2003), an M.S. in Bioengineering from UC San Diego (2005), and a Ph.D. from the Harvard–MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (2010), where his thesis advisor was Sangeeta Bhatia. He co-founded two companies while still completing his doctorate, and his early work earned him the Lemelson–MIT Student Prize and a Collegiate Inventors Competition graduate prize, both in 2009. He is listed as an inventor on more than 200 patents and patent applications and has co-authored more than 20 peer-reviewed articles.

Von Maltzahn joined Flagship Pioneering, the Cambridge-based venture-creation firm behind Moderna, in 2009. Working through Flagship Labs, the firm's innovation foundry, he helped conceive and launch a string of companies over the following decade, and served in operating roles such as chief technology officer at Seres Therapeutics and chief innovation officer at Indigo Agriculture. He was elevated to General Partner at Flagship in 2020. His deep technical expertise spans genome engineering, the microbiome, bioengineering, and nanotechnology.

Companies he has co-founded have collectively reached more than $10 billion in aggregate public and private market capitalization, including two that went public — Sana Biotechnology (NASDAQ: SANA) and Seres Therapeutics (NASDAQ: MCRB). Rather than being a passive check-writer, von Maltzahn is an operator-founder who typically originates the scientific thesis, incorporates the company, and often leads it early on.

His current flagship effort is Lila Sciences, where he is CEO and co-founder. Lila emerged from stealth in March 2025 with a mission to build "scientific superintelligence" — AI-driven autonomous "Science Factories." The company raised roughly $200M in seed funding, followed by a large Series A (reported at $235M–$350M) and additional capital from investors including NVIDIA's venture arm, pushing its valuation above $1.3 billion in 2025.

• Practices venture creation, not conventional investing: companies are originated inside Flagship Labs from a scientific "what if" question, then capitalized and staffed by the firm — so "getting to yes" means the idea survives Flagship's internal ProtoCo/NewCo vetting rather than an external pitch.
• Focused on platform biology at the intersection of biology and data/AI — genome engineering, microbiome, cell & gene therapy, protein design, and, most recently, AI-for-science.
• Backs breakthrough, category-defining hypotheses with large addressable problems in human health and sustainability, rather than incremental products.
• Comfortable committing to long-horizon, capital-intensive, deep-science bets and taking operating roles (CEO/CTO/board chair) inside the ventures he creates.
• Themes he has publicly championed include the microbiome as medicine (Seres), engineering the plant microbiome for agriculture (Indigo), programmable gene writing (Tessera), generative AI for biologics (Generate:Biomedicines), and autonomous AI-run science (Lila).