TLR Ventures: We Build With You
An investment partner for early-stage companies in life sciences and deep technology — with strong founders, sound fundamentals, and a clear path to profitability.
Behind TLR Ventures
Built by someone who has built
Timothy L. Robertson, Ph.D.
Founder & CEO, TLR Ventures and TLR+
Timothy L. Robertson is a scientific executive who pushes the boundaries of technological possibility to improve human health, combining deep training as an experimental physicist with extensive experience in general management to accomplish things that have never been done before.
Since 2005, he has been building platforms that bring Silicon Valley’s advances in electronics, sensors, data processing, and artificial intelligence to the medical device, pharmaceutical, and digital health industries. That work includes inventing the ingestible sensor at Proteus Biomedical, founding Mousera/Vium to bring computer vision and continuous monitoring to preclinical research, and spinning out Precision Livestock Technologies to apply the same approach to cattle feeding.
Building on that foundation, Tim pioneered the “startup-for-hire” model through TLR+, assembling elite teams to tackle transformative challenges for enterprises in life sciences and healthcare, and founded TLR Ventures to invest directly in early-stage companies with strong fundamentals.
He holds a degree in physics from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley. He lives in Belmont, California, with his wife, Jyothi, and their three children.
The thesis
A new kind of venture
TLR Ventures is an investment partner for early-stage companies with strong founders, positive unit economics, and the fundamentals to back their ambition. We don’t bet on volume and hope one company in the portfolio pays for the rest. We choose our partners deliberately, bringing capital and hands-on expertise directly into the businesses we believe in, and staying closely involved through every stage of their growth.
Portfolio
Companies we’ve backed
Precision Livestock Technologies
Bringing computer vision to the feedlot.
HealthRhythms
Turning a smartphone into a mental health early-warning system.
The other half of TLR
Different stage, different need
If you’re an established enterprise looking to build a custom technology platform instead, that’s the work of our sister company, TLR+, which partners with enterprises to design, build, and deliver technology platforms using our “startup-for-hire” model.