Kanyi Maqubela

lover, not-fighter. building and funding startups: @kindredventures, @heartbeat

[Mgoes (bio/acc 🤖💉) @m_goes_distance]

2026 is shaping up to be the most important year in the history of human health

just look at what dropped most recently:

→ pancreatic cancer: 5-year survival rate under 3%. daraxonrasib just nearly doubled median survival. standing ovation at ASCO 2026.

→ obesity: retatrutide phase 3 dropped. 30% bodyweight lost. 45% of patients hit results previously only possible through surgery. three hormone pathways. one compound.

→ testosterone decline: FDA just took formal steps to expand testosterone therapy for low libido in men. April 2026. men's health is finally being taken seriously at the regulatory level.

→ fertility: scientists just rejuvenated aging human eggs in the lab. 8 healthy babies born via 3-person mitochondrial IVF. AI scanning 1M+ sperm images per hour.

four of the biggest problems in human health are moving in the same quarter

are you watching the timeline anon?

bio/acc is brutal this year.

[Matthew Prince 🌥 @eastdakota]

Welp, that happened faster than I predicted. Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history. https://t.co/2zX5bHdhsa

[Kanyi Maqubela @km]

electronics should be nice to look at, easy to use, and take you places. check out the table 🔥

[Opal @opalelectronics]

the table.
an update on opal electronics.

https://t.co/91eGxO5qV6

[Kanyi Maqubela @km]

Apple Intelligence has been a zero for me. Is the galaxy brain take still that their owned silicon + no capex spend will win in the end?

[Josh @joshavata]

Today @MeckaAI is announcing $60M in funding to become the data and deployment layer for physical AI

This raise will allow us to scale our data infrastructure, invest into new verticals, and deploy robots into the real world

[Kanyi Maqubela @km]

@imaliyoungblood it was so loud til the very end! jess sighting, too :)

[Kanyi Maqubela @km]

*significantly* louder in chase for valks than dubs.

[Ivan Werning @IvanWerning]

A friend just revealed to me that the middle name of Benoit B. Mandelbrot is Benoit B. Mandelbrot.

[Kanyi Maqubela @km]

@pitdesi So many stories of him identifying technology themes (and teams) that ended up becoming the world's most important. The AI one has airtime now due to M*sk. Goog + SpaceX... Goog + Uber... And here's one on self-driving: https://t.co/gd29TafSsj

[Kanyi Maqubela @km]

Larry Page does not get enough credit.

[Yuchen Jin @Yuchenj_UW]

Google is fighting every final boss at once:

OpenAI & Anthropic in models, Nvidia in chips, AWS & Microsoft in cloud, Meta in ads, Tesla in self-driving, Apple in phones and OS.

At $4.6T, it feels weirdly undervalued.

[Kanyi Maqubela @km]

sure to be a banger. two gentlemen that work exceptionally hard and are deeply passionate about technology.

[nico laqua @nico_laqua]

Harry reminds me a lot of the culture we've built at Corgi.

Last week, I spent some time with @HarryStebbings in London and it's incredible what he's built for the startup community since starting with zero connections and $50 in London (quite some distance from Silicon Valley) back in 2014.

[Kanyi Maqubela @km]

Major congrats to my partner @stevejang on his 3rd @Forbes Midas List appearance!

He’s been all-in on AI since 2019—tracking computer vision use cases, the rise of GANs and then diffusion models, AI hardware, and how early language models would reset the world. By 2022, when we went all in, we’d already spent years studying, investing, learning the hard way, and building. We don’t organize around chasing hot deals; we organize around deep, thematic research and portfolio support. That sometimes means exploring sectors until the insight and conviction are earned, then betting with high energy on that work.

That’s how investments like @Perplexity happen a few months after their launch, or @fal before “generative media” (coined by @Burkay Gur, @Gorkem Yurtseven, and Steve in our office) was even a thing. Before this cycle, investments like @Uber, @Coinbase, @Color, and @tonal (all early contrarian bets at the time) were the inspirations for his style. I’m biased, but Steve’s combo of product obsession and real go-to-market help is rare; most early-stage folks only have one of those gears.

At @KindredVentures, we love the early stage. It’s still where the biggest impact in venture gets made, and where we’ll keep doing our work. Grateful the market recognizes the craft here, and even more excited about what’s next. Huge congrats to Steve, and thank you to our founders for the mountains you move every day.⚡️⚡️⚡️

https://t.co/19e5n3VAag

[Paul Graham @paulg]

If these are the most relentless people Jared has worked with, they must be something else, because Jared has been a YC partner so long that the founders he's worked with comprise a hall of fame of relentlessness.

[Kanyi Maqubela @km]

Persistent, relentless execution from this team. It's intimidating! Excited for them to continue to transform one of the largest markets on earth.

[nico laqua @nico_laqua]

We raised another $106M at a $2.6B valuation since announcing our last round three weeks ago.

Corgi has grown exponentially in the past couple of months, but we're only just getting started transforming one of the largest sectors in the US economy: insurance.

[Timothy Gowers @wtgowers @wtgowers]

Another major problem, this time in additive combinatorics, has fallen, this time to humans rather than AI, but using methods related to the AI solution to the unit distance conjecture.

[Kanyi Maqubela @km]

@erikalee @stevejang ! indeed, many more :)

[Kanyi Maqubela @km]

3rd times the charm! Major congrats to my partner @stevejang on this recognition. To many many more!

https://t.co/bLonlm4FbU

[Kanyi Maqubela @km]

@FDavidsonT please

[Kanyi Maqubela @km]

personalized mRNA solving cancer. 🔥

[Avi Roy @agingroy]

Five cancers that used to be death sentences. Pancreatic. Glioblastoma. Triple-negative breast. Renal. Melanoma. The median survival for metastatic pancreatic cancer is still 6 months. Glioblastoma, 15 months.

Now personalized mRNA vaccines are producing complete remissions in some of these patients. Not responses. Remissions.

BioNTech’s pancreatic cancer vaccine has 6-year follow-up data. 8 of 16 patients who mounted an immune response are still alive. For a cancer that kills 95% of patients within 5 years, that's incredible.

Topol’s pyramid here maps the trajectory. From broad checkpoint inhibitors at the base to personalized neoantigen vaccines at the peak. The technology is climbing.

[Kanyi Maqubela @km]

Marketplaces: @Uber
Crypto: @coinbase
Consumer AI: @perplexity_ai
AI infra: @fal
Future: follow @KindredVentures :)

Receipts don’t lie.