Nicholas Conley

Nicholas Conley is a scientist-founder turned angel investor best known as the co-founder of EpiBiome, a venture-backed precision microbiome-engineering company based in South San Francisco. At EpiBiome he served in multiple leadership roles, including Chief Executive Officer and Chief Science Officer, building what the company described as the world's first fully automated, high-throughput platform for discovering, characterizing, and sequencing bacteriophages as alternatives to conventional small-molecule antibiotics. Under his tenure, EpiBiome was accepted into the Illumina Accelerator, Johnson & Johnson Innovation's JLABS, and the Stanford-StartX accelerator; secured non-dilutive funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense; established a top-3 pharma partnership; and raised more than $10 million in financing (including a $6M Series A in 2016).

Conley trained as a chemist and molecular biologist. He earned a BS in Chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in Chemistry from Stanford University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in developmental biology, also at Stanford. He carries a notable "Nobel pedigree," having worked in the lab of Professor W. E. Moerner, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and held a string of fellowships including a Beckman Fellowship, an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and a Stanford Molecular Imaging Scholars Fellowship. He has published roughly 18 peer-reviewed papers spanning palladium catalysis, super-resolution fluorescence imaging, single-molecule DNA detection, and cancer biology, and holds several U.S. patents. Before EpiBiome he worked as a staff scientist at HGST (a Western Digital company).

In 2018, EpiBiome's high-throughput phage-discovery platform was acquired by Locus Biosciences, a CRISPR-engineered bacteriophage (crPhage) therapeutics company. Conley joined Locus, where he became Vice President of Technology and later Chief Technology Officer, helping develop Locus's platform phage-manufacturing process used in the first clinical trial of a recombinant bacteriophage therapy. Alongside his operating career, he invests personally as an angel in early-stage deep-tech and life-science startups.

• Invests as an individual angel, primarily at the seed / early stage, writing personal checks into founder-led companies.
• Gravitates toward deep science and hard-tech aligned with his own expertise: biotech, microbiome and phage/antimicrobial therapeutics, gene therapy/nanomedicine, and precision instrumentation/semiconductors.
• As a technical, PhD-scientist founder himself (automation, next-gen sequencing, high-throughput biology), he is well suited to back technically ambitious teams solving fundamental scientific or engineering problems.
• His own company was built on displacing shared-class antibiotics from human health and agriculture to fight antimicrobial resistance — a signal of interest in platform technologies with large, mission-driven markets.