State of the Venture Capital Financing Market (Day 2 of 2)

​Paul Hastings LLP is hosting a 2-day series at MBC BioLabs on September 22, 2026 (1030 Brittan Ave, San Carlos) and September 23, 2026 (135 Mississippi St, SF).

​Please join us for a discussion of the current state of the venture capital market financing and a Q&A session with VCs from the Bay Area life sciences community.

​Moderator:

​Matt Kovac - Paul Hastings LLP

​Speakers:

• ​Landon Merrill from Genoa Ventures - Landon is a Partner at Genoa Ventures where he brings world-class skills in structured, rigorous product strategy and development to deal diligence and portfolio company support. With a wide range of technical and commercial leadership experience in organizations ranging from startups to multinationals, from life science tools to pharma discovery platforms, Landon brings a diverse set of experiences and a keen ability to identify opportunities for cross-pollination.  
  
  Landon started his career as a founding team member of a small start-up in Boston. While leading application development for this team and earning his masters degree in genetics, he had the opportunity to teach at UMass-Boston, where he fell in love with communicating scientific content and educating. After moving to Harvard Partners Center for Personalized Genomic Medicine to help establish an NGS sequencing core, he led technology and process development efforts for an encoded library technology platform at GlaxoSmithKline. Landon continued to teach at UMass-Boston through his subsequent product development time at New England Biolabs, right through moving to the Bay Area to be a founding team member of 10X Genomics.
  
  At 10X Genomics Landon initially worked on the development of the GemCode assays, but quickly moved on to managing customer engagement and ultimately the commercial launch of the platform. He also spent time at Purigen Biosystems to lead the Product Management and Corporate Strategy efforts, and Synthomics leading Commercial Operations.
  
  Landon has an MSc in Genetics from the University of Massachusetts-Boston and a BS from Connecticut College. He joined Genoa to leverage his chimeric experience to help build stronger and more resilient ventures that aim to bring transformative technologies to market. Landon loves nothing more than getting to know founding teams and helping them develop clarity around a vision and strategy that can be translated into action.

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• ​Amanda Cashin from Wing VC - Amanda Cashin, PhD is a driven life science venture investor, company builder, entrepreneur, and industry executive. Dr. Cashin is currently an investment Parter at Wing Venture Capital, where she is focused on early-stage therapeutics investments, including innovative medicines in oncology and immunology. Most recently, Dr. Cashin co-founded and was CEO of Prisma Bio, a breakthrough optical protein-sequencing company. Previously, Dr. Cashin co-founded and was Global Head of Illumina For Startups & Illumina Accelerator - a founding investor in 74 startups across therapeutics, synbio, tools, diagnostics & agtech. Previously, she was Senior Vice President of Alexandria Venture Investments where she led the strategic corporate venture capital arm of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. She earned a Ph.D. in Chemical Biology from the California Institute of Technology and graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor's degree in Physical Organic Chemistry from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

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• ​Po Bronson from SOSV - Po is a General Partner at SOSV and Managing Director of SOSV SF. He is passionate about reconceptualizing complex challenges into more elegant forms in order to broaden understanding and highlight priorities. Po is a longtime science journalist honored with nine national awards, and author of seven bestselling books that are available in 28 languages worldwide. His work has been cited in 185 academic journals and 503 books. His background is in Economics. He learned finance at Credit Suisse and consulting at a division of Arthur Andersen. Prior to IndieBio he spent four years as a Futurist with Attention Span Media, consulting corporate innovation efforts for globally recognized brands. Most recently, Po is the author of Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner, published by Twelve Books, a division of the Hachette Publishing Group.