Caribou Biosciences: Spinning Out a Nobel Prize–Winning Discovery
Company founded: 2011
Founders: UC Berkeley Professor Jennifer Doudna, Rachel Haurwitz (UC Berkeley PhD, 2008, molecular and cell biology), Martin Jinek (UC Berkeley postdoc), UC Berkeley Professor James Berger
UC Berkeley professor Jennifer Doudna, with Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing based on research that they published in 2012. A year earlier, Doudna had launched her first startup company, Caribou Biosciences, with one of her graduate students, Rachel Haurwitz, as CEO.
Prior to cofounding Caribou, Doudna had not thought much about commercializing technology developed in her lab, but she liked the idea of being part of a company that could have an impact on people’s health.1
Likewise, Haurwitz was intrigued with the biotech industry. Although she was a skilled researcher, Haurwitz didn’t want academic research to be her career. So while completing her PhD, she took courses at UC Berkeley’s School of Business. By the time she was in her final year of research in Doudna’s lab, Haurwitz had decided she wanted to run a biotech company.2
In 2011, the two scientists, along with UC Berkeley professor James Berger and postdoc Martin Jinek, cofounded Caribou. The startup benefitted from invaluable support from the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences. QB3’s “Startup in a Box” program (superseded by general entrepreneurship support on legal, banking, and mentoring) helped Doudna and Haurwitz incorporate the company and establish bank services. The startup’s early focus was on RNA diagnostic tools based on CRISPR technology from Doudna’s lab as well as CRISPR Cas9-mediated genome editing, both licensed from UC Berkeley.
Initially, the cofounders launched the company with investment from friends and family. Caribou then attracted investment interest primarily from corporate venture capital (rather than traditional institutional venture capital) who believed in the potential of genome editing.
In his book The Code Breaker, Walter Isaacson wrote that Haurwitz “had talents not often found in Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. With her steady personality, she was a naturally good manager. She was down to earth, unflappable, practical, and straightforward. There was no whiff of the combination of ego and insecurity exuded by many startup CEOs. She did not exaggerate or overpromise. That offered many advantages, one of which was that people tended to underestimate her.”
In 2013, a QB3 grant-writing workshop helped Caribou obtain $300,000 in funding from the US government’s Small Business Innovation Research program. With that funding, Caribou launched operations in the QB3 Garage incubator lab located in UC Berkeley’s Stanley Hall. Caribou raised $11 million in Series A financing in 2015. The venture capital fund Mission Bay Capital, then affiliated with QB3, participated in that financing. That funding enabled the startup to expand to a larger lab and office space in the QB3 East Bay Innovation Center, located on the west side of Berkeley and operated in partnership with the real estate firm Wareham Development. Caribou raised $30 million in Series B financing in 2016, $115 million in Series C financing in early 2021, and in the summer of 2021 the company raised $350 million in its initial public offering that valued the company at nearly a billion dollars.
As of 2024, Caribou has more than 140 employees and is conducting clinical trials on off-the-shelf CAR-T cell therapies using next-generation CRISPR technology developed by the company. The two founders have stayed involved with QB3 and UC Berkeley. Haurwitz regularly participates in speaking events to inspire women entrepreneurs. Caribou became a corporate affiliate of UC Berkeley’s Bakar Labs incubator, sponsoring its lab space, events, and programming for up-and-coming bioentrepreneurs. Doudna went on to found and lead the governance board of the Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley.
1 Walter Isaacson, The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021), 114.
2 Isaacson, Code Breaker, 115.
Published in Startup Campus: How UC Berkeley Became an Unexpected Leader in Entrepreneurship and Startups, August 2025
