Yosemite Closes $350M Fund II for Cancer Research and Care

A research grant asks Yosemite to make a decision before a venture investment may even be possible. The San Francisco oncology firm supports scientific work while the people doing it are still establishing what they have, giving its company-building activity a relationship with the research that comes first.

Yosemite closed Fund II at $350M, Reed Jobs told Fortune on November 4, 2026. The financing extends the investment side of a model that also uses a separate charitable vehicle to support academic research. For biotech founders and institutions, the interesting part is how those relationships survive the passage from an experiment to a business.

Founder and Managing Partner Reed Jobs leads a firm whose stated mission is to make cancer non-lethal. That ambition puts research, company formation and the delivery of care inside one field of attention, while leaving each with a different financing problem. A scientist seeking an answer and an investor seeking an ownership stake can be interested in the same work for very different reasons.

What Yosemite's Fund II Close Represents

The exact vehicle is Yosemite Fund II, L.P., rather than an equity round in the management company. Its January 29 SEC notice listed a $350M offering denominated in USD, with no sales recorded on that notice. A filing establishes what the issuer disclosed at that point; it is a poor substitute for keeping the subsequent fundraising chronology straight.

Forbes's January reporting described more than $200M raised toward the $350M target. It named Amgen, Memorial Sloan Kettering, MIT and John Doerr among the backers, and reported Emerson Collective's participation. The November close therefore belongs to the same vehicle's progression, rather than a second pot of money to add to January's amount.

That distinction also matters when assessing Yosemite's ability to finance companies. Committed fund size, current cash available for investment and dollars already deployed answer different questions. The sources reviewed do not establish Fund II's current deployment, remaining commitments or investment-level performance, so the close is best understood as a completed fundraising milestone with the investment work still unfolding.

Why Yosemite Funds Work Before Company Formation

Yosemite's 2023 launch announcement described a strategy spanning research grants, incubation and early translation in therapeutics, diagnostics and digital health. The firm became independent from Emerson Collective with the existing health team, whose work had begun in 2015. Its starting asset included relationships with researchers, alongside the capital it was raising.

The commercial significance is the timing of the conversation. Research can need another experiment while a company proposal is still premature. A charitable grant gives the work a financing route at that stage; a later investment asks whether the science can support an enterprise with people, development responsibilities and an economic future.

For a scientist, those are substantial changes in the assignment. Explaining why a question deserves investigation is different from explaining how a company will carry a discovery forward. Yosemite's disclosed approach allows the firm to encounter both, although a grant should never be read as a promise of an eventual investment or a shortcut around the evidence a company will need.

Tune Therapeutics's current biography of Reed Jobs identifies him as the person managing Yosemite and describes his earlier health-investing work at Emerson Collective. That continuity helps explain why the independent firm's formation is more than a new name attached to a first fund. The relationships and institutional memory preceded the standalone manager.

The Charitable Program Has Its Own Accounting

In a February 2026 disclosure, Yosemite reported that a donor-advised charitable vehicle had deployed more than $18M in grants since the firm's 2023 launch. The firm described an American Cancer Society collaboration and support for initiatives at Mayo Clinic and City of Hope. These are dated, company-reported descriptions of the philanthropic program, separate from Fund II commitments.

Keeping that separation visible makes the operating model easier to evaluate. A charitable research program can be assessed by what it enables scientists to investigate and learn. A venture fund carries obligations attached to the companies it owns and the capital entrusted to it. Describing them together should illuminate their relationship without making their budgets or results interchangeable.

The care-delivery initiatives also broaden the practical meaning of Yosemite's mission. Better science has to find its way into institutions, products and patient services. DevCuration's earlier coverage of Teal Health's at-home cervical-screening financing described Yosemite's place in a distinct company financing, where distribution and follow-up became part of the business problem. That company event is context for the ecosystem, rather than evidence of Fund II's allocation.

What Biotech Founders Should Understand

A founder approaching Yosemite needs to be clear about the stage of the work. Funding an exploratory question, developing a company around a finding and financing a growing business call for different evidence and different commitments. The firm's disclosed reach across those stages creates several possible conversations, with no basis for assuming that each research relationship follows a fixed route into its venture portfolio.

For research institutions, the model raises useful questions about the handoff itself. When does an investigation become ready for company formation, who takes responsibility for the development plan, and what evidence supports that decision? Those questions follow from the grant-and-investment structure; the public disclosures do not provide the terms of every institutional relationship or rights attached to individual projects.

The $350M closing gives Yosemite an established vehicle behind its investment decisions. The work nearest the laboratory will continue to ask a less tidy question: which scientific idea deserves the next experiment, and who will stay involved as its implications become clearer? Somewhere inside that sequence, Reed Jobs and a research team may begin discussing a company that could not have been described convincingly when the first grant was considered.