After the disaster of office-rental startup Knotel last year, its founder Amol Sarva is now back as a VC with a $100 million fund
- The founder of office rental startup Knotel, Amol Sarva, is launching a $100 million fund.
- Life Extension Ventures will invest in startups focused on "longevity for people and planet."
A year and a half after his proptech startup collapsed, Amol Sarva has resurfaced in Silicon Valley — this time as a VC.
The former startup founder announced the launch of his new $100 million fund, Life Extension Ventures. Based in New York, the fund will focus on "longevity for people and planet."
Inaki Berenguer, who founded insurance-tech startup CoverWallet as well as Contactive and Pixable, is helming the fund alongside Sarva, who led Knotel from a $1.6 billion valuation straight to bankruptcy.
Sarva founded Knotel in 2015 alongside Russian-born entrepreneur Edward Shenderovich. The office-rental startup designed and built custom headquarters for corporations, leasing out the spaces under flexible terms.
Early on, Sarva often pitted Knotel against industry incumbent WeWork, even telling Bloomberg in a 2019 interview that his startup would overtake the larger competitor, likening it to Amazon overtaking eBay and Facebook forcing Myspace into obscurity.
At first, it seemed like Sarva was right. At its height, Knotel managed nearly 5 million square feet of property, raising $560 million over three years and reaching unicorn status.
When the pandemic hit and offices moved to remote work in March 2020, Knotel laid off or furloughed half of its employees and struggled to pay landlords, even while promising investors that profitability was around the corner. However, employees told Insider that issues with the company began long before the pandemic. Knotel's obsession with beating WeWork led to bidding wars, vacant offices, and damaged relationships with landlords and brokers.
In January 2021, Knotel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and announced its intention to sell its business to commercial real estate company and Knotel investor Newmark.
Following Knotel's purchase, Sarva cofounded a slew of startups and venture-focused companies throughout 2021, including venture studio Popular Change, B2B ecommerce platform CornerUp, and commercial real-estate startup Aikito, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Life Extension Ventures will invest in longevity-focused startups that expand beyond just health and fitness, according to TechCrunch, which first reported the news. Longevity startup investments hit $40 billion in 2021 and could grow to $600 billion by 2025, according to The Aging Analytics Agency and Bank of America, and the area can include innovations like biotech-oriented disease prevention to organ regeneration.
In addition to health and biotech, the fund will also focus on climate-focused startups to support longevity for the plantet.
Berenguer has already made multiple longevity-focused investments in recent months that are listed on the fund's website: Particle Health, which uses an API to combine health records and Mable, which uses DNA-personalized medicine to treat migraines.