Robert Blazej

Robert Blazej is a Partner at Mission Bay Capital (which now operates as Mission BioCapital), an early-stage life-science venture firm affiliated with the MBC BioLabs shared-laboratory incubator network. He joined the firm in 2017 and also serves as a Director at MBC BioLabs. At the firm he invests in early-stage life-science companies and is responsible for coordinating firmwide due-diligence efforts on new investment opportunities. His addition to the management team was highlighted alongside the firm's expansion when it announced a $60 million Fund III in September 2019 (more than double its prior $25 million Fund II).

Blazej describes himself as a passionate biotechnologist with a skillset spanning business, life science, engineering, and intellectual property, bringing roughly a decade of operational experience as both a startup founder and a corporate leader. As an entrepreneur, he co-founded and served as CEO of Allopartis Biotechnologies, launched out of QB3's original "garage" incubator at UCSF. Allopartis was acquired by Novozymes in 2013, becoming Novozymes' Digital Biotechnology research site in San Francisco, which Blazej directed (along with the company's global biotechnology scouting team) before moving into venture capital.

He earned his Ph.D. in Bioengineering in 2006, jointly from UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco, and holds a B.A. in Molecular Cell Biology from UC Berkeley. His graduate research focused on the design and characterization of microfluidic systems for next-generation DNA sequencing, and he contributed to the human, drosophila, and canine genome projects, with work published in PNAS and Nature.

Blazej is active as a board director and observer across the firm's portfolio, giving him hands-on governance experience with several clinical- and platform-stage biotech companies.

• Invests at seed and Series A in early-stage life-science companies, with typical checks of $100K–$5M and a sweet spot around $1.5M.
• Focus on biotech and life sciences broadly — therapeutics, diagnostics, synthetic biology, sustainable materials, and healthy food production — reflecting the firm's mission to back "innovative entrepreneurs working on vital medical and environmental challenges."
• Strong preference for companies emerging from the MBC BioLabs incubator ecosystem; the incubator network has helped launch 138+ companies that collectively raised over $3.5 billion, giving Blazej deep early visibility into promising founders.
• Values scientific rigor and translatable platform technology — consistent with his own background building microfluidic DNA-sequencing systems and running a synthetic-biology company acquired by a strategic (Novozymes).