Our Team
We’re a team of operators, scientists, and investors with deep roots in research, entrepreneurship, and frontier technology. From labs to venture-backed startups, we’ve lived the journey — and now we support those bold enough to shape what’s next.
hello@starbloom.capital
Founder, Managing Director
James Fickel
James is the founder of Starbloom Capital.
James is an investor and futurist, seeking frontier technologies that have the potential to radically improve the state of humanity. As an early investor in Ethereum, James has leveraged his capital to fund ambitious projects across longevity, neuroscience, AI, crypto, and more. Namely, he founded the Amaranth Foundation to accelerate research in neuroscience and longevity, funding academic research at many leading institutions, while also backing revolutionary initiatives such as the Enigma Project, E11 Bio, Forest Neurotech, Impetus Grants, and the AFAR SuperAgers Cohort.
Director, Diversified Investments
Kevin Liang
Kevin leads Starbloom’s investments across sectors, backing transformative companies at the frontier of innovation.
Kevin is a hybrid operator-investor intrigued by next-gen technologies. He’s concurrently working on Etherealize, aiming to connect Wall Street to the Ethereum ecosystem. Prior to Starbloom, Kevin was the Chief of Staff to Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) at Workplay Ventures, where he incubated projects and invested in companies building in AI, consumer internet, and gaming. While pursuing his MBA at Stanford, Kevin built a web3 social Q&A platform and an AI-powered narration tool for children. Earlier in his career, he was a product manager at Homebase, a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and an M&A investment banker at Citigroup.
Kevin holds a BA in Economics from Harvard University and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Director, Biotech Investments
Jarod Rutledge
Jarod leads Starbloom’s investments in biotechnology and life sciences.
Jarod is an interdisciplinary scientist and entrepreneur dedicated to expanding human health, human potential, and human agency. He is passionate about healthy life extension, AI, and neurotechnology. At Starbloom he oversees a portfolio spanning traditional and frontier therapeutics, platforms, medical devices, techbio, life science tools, and diagnostics. Before joining Starbloom, Jarod built companies in CNS drug development, molecular diagnostics, and computer vision technology, and has extensive research and development experience spanning the biology of aging, neuroimmunology, AI, functional genomics, human genetics, medicinal chemistry, materials science, synthetic biology, and computational biology. Jarod’s work has been published in Nature, Cell, Science, and featured in global news outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Time Magazine.
Jarod holds a BS in Biochemistry and Chemistry from Colorado College, a PhD in Genetics from Stanford University, and completed postdoctoral training in AI and functional genomics at Stanford University and EMBL Heidelberg.
Director, neuroAI Investments
Joanne Peng
Joanne leads Starbloom’s investments in neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and neurotechnology.
Joanne concurrently serves as Research Director of the Amaranth Foundation, where she oversees philanthropic investments in neuroscience and longevity research, including as lead of investments into the Enigma Project, E11 Bio, and Forest Neurotech. Previously, Joanne was a Thiel Fellow, Interact Fellow, Day One Project Fellow, and Davis UWC Scholar. With seven years of diverse scientific experience, Joanne has made significant contributions across multiple disciplines. Her work spans spatial protein sequencing at MIT’s Boyden Lab, metabolic modeling at Princeton University, mitochondrial dynamics at the Biomedical Institute at MaRS, COVID testing at Curative, and cancer research at the Buck Institute.
Joanne is currently on a leave of absence from a BSE in Computer Science at Princeton University.
Director, neuroAI Research
Patrick Mineault
Patrick leads Starbloom’s research in neuroscience and artificial intelligence.
Patrick concurrently serves as the neuroAI Research Lead at the Amaranth Foundation, where he oversees neuroscience and artificial intelligence research. A computational vision neuroscientist by training, he focuses his time at Amaranth and Starbloom on creating a path toward safe AI by learning from the brain. His research at the intersection of neuroscience and AI has been published in NeurIPS, PNAS, Neuron, Nature Human Behavior, and the Journal of Neuroscience, and has been featured in The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and a16z’s Future. In prior roles, Patrick was a data scientist and software engineer at Google, a brain-computer interface engineer at Meta, a senior machine learning scientist at Mila, and was a co-founder of Neuromatch. He runs the neuroAI archive, the most subscribed neuroAI Substack.
Patrick holds a BS in Mathematics and Physics and a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University.
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