BioSTL’s 25th year is proving pivotal as the nonprofit navigates choppy budget waters
The nonprofit that serves as a backbone for St. Louis’ biosciences scene saw core funders step away last year, even as worthy startups are bubbling up like never before.
by Eric Schmid | St. Louis Magazine | April 6, 2026 at 5:45 AM
Just over 25 years ago, the very first seeds of what would blossom into core parts of St. Louis’ existing innovation ecosystem were being sown.
What started as meetings of The Coalition for Plant Life Sciences gave way to core institutions, such as the Cortex Innovation District, BioSTL, and BioGenerator. BioSTL founding president and CEO Donn Rubin acknowledges that he and others were “quite naive” at the time about what it would take to build a local innovation economy.
“We thought that if we just had locally managed investment dollars, new startups would pop up and grow with very little additional effort,” he says. “But it turns out that the people are more important than the capital.”
These days, however, as BioSTL celebrates its 25th anniversary, it’s also confronting challenges that largely revolve around money. WashU moved to stop its annual seven-figure support amid its own budget challenges under the Trump administration. BJC Health System has pulled back as well. That’s coming at a time when Rubin believes the local startup ecosystem needs resources flowing in to spur new companies—and it’s led BioSTL to seek out new funding sources and explore new strategies.
He stresses the moment right now is no cause for alarm. But it is a new phase for the nonprofit.
At the time of its founding, the St. Louis region had no shortage of people making new discoveries, but lacked individuals with connections to, or expertise in how to build and scale new companies, Rubin explains.
Two-and-a-half decades later, the story is different. BioSTL, through its startup investment arm, BioGenerator Ventures, has pushed $50 million in scores of new startups. Rubin says those investments have yielded another $3 billion in follow-on capital, the majority of which has flowed into St. Louis from elsewhere.
Standing up new companies still requires money, though—it’s “the most resource intensive thing that we do, by far,” Rubin says. And that’s an area where the opportunity is now outstripping the resources BioSTL has to foster new startups. In recent years, the number of “quality potential deals” has doubled or even tripled, Rubin says, but the organization’s capital on hand specifically meant to de-risk and establish such companies hasn’t kept up.
Rubin believes it’s essential for BioSTL to find funding to carry out this part of its mission.
“It’s not about having all the capital here in St. Louis,” he notes. “It’s about having enough capital to de-risk at the early stages and build quality companies, quality teams, quality technology, and investable startups.”
A Bottleneck
Rubin acknowledges the organization is experiencing a major bottleneck. “As of early 2026, we have the smallest investment budget that we’ve had in years, at a time when deal flow is blossoming,” he says. “In some ways, there’s been a perfect storm of budgetary challenges for us and other similar organizations as well.”
The year 2025, and President Donald Trump’s second term, brought considerable turbulence for nonprofits and academic institutions across the country after the president moved to slash funding for scientific endeavors. Washington University, which has been one of BioSTL’s core funders for years, was hit particularly hard and had to forgo staff merit raises and even laid off hundreds last year.
Another casualty of this budget crunch was the roughly $1.5 million the university had been giving to BioSTL each year.
“We’re all reading about the financial stresses on universities and that was clearly referenced in the message of the termination of discretionary funding for BioSTL,” Rubin says. “It doesn’t foreclose other kinds of funding and transactional collaborations that can bring resources to BioSTL to enable us to generate outcomes that they value.”
Another core funder, BJC Health System, also pulled back their average annual $1.5 million contribution too, he adds.
The two losses made for a big hit for BioSTL’s “discretionary funding,” which can more freely be spent to develop new companies. He adds the nonprofits’ other core operations—focused on activities including policy, workforce development, and establishing a global presence—are not at risk of being scaled back since many are “self-funded” or supported by private foundations, and state and federal grants.
“Most grants and funding sources don’t fund investments. So we have to be creative in funding investments, and that’s where discretionary funding comes in,” Rubin says. “A loss [there] has a most direct hit on the investment budget.”
At the same time, some of BioSTL’s past investments have helped cultivate companies, like Wugen and Geneoscopy, that have found considerable traction but have not yet exited, which keeps any return for BioSTL locked up for now. And that’s added another complicating layer.
“Rather than scaling, we’re working hard to just kind of tread water at the moment,” Rubin says. “But I see that as a plateau before we scale.” He adds, “We will scale to meet the opportunity.”
To Rubin, the loss of financial support from WashU doesn’t shut the door on the two organizations continuing to collaborate. It just means the core relationship will be different moving forward.
“The university cares about the commercialization of their intellectual property and an external partner with a track record like BioSTL can be of great value to that,” he says.
Doug Frantz, vice chancellor for innovation and commercialization at WashU, says he’s keen on ushering more intellectual property grown inside the university into new companies. He says it’s part of why the university joined a consortium of Midwestern institutions setting up space in San Francisco to interface with venture capital.
“The interesting thing for a lot of universities within the Midwest is that, on average, it takes our companies about 18 months longer to raise their first half-million in capital [and] get things off the ground than it does say [for] a company in Kendall Square in Boston,” Frantz says. “We, as an ecosystem within St. Louis, have to learn how to play much better offense with respect to getting our startup companies out the door, [and] on solid footing.”
Still, he sees plenty of opportunity for WashU to leverage the work of BioSTL.
“Moving forward, you’re going to find a renewed partnership between WashU and BioSTL, where we are going to strategically think about those investments as it pertains to getting our companies out the door,” Frantz says, adding he thinks it’s essential the entire St. Louis innovation ecosystem proactively cultivate and build new viable startups.
“If we try to wait for that density to build in St. Louis, I think we’re going to continue to have this slow trajectory,” he says.
New funding sources
Rubin, for his part, says BioSTL has managed to find a few new funding sources that allow the organization to drive investments into new companies.
He points to previous core contributors, Paula and Rodger Riney, who have committed $1.5 million annually for the next three years to invest in biomedical startups. And Rubin says BioSTL has secured another nearly $3 million over the next three years from a different local institution to support the creation of local agtech focused companies. He declined to share specifics as that deal has not been formally announced yet.
Plus, BioGenerator is in the process of establishing two for-profit venture studios centered on innovations in digital health and research tools, with each studio intent on standing up seven or eight new local startups in the next five years.
“Our nonprofit organization will serve as a co-general partner in these for-profit funds,” he says. “It’s a mechanism to bring more investment to the table, not as follow-on, but at the very beginning of standing up new companies.”
Rubin stresses that these moves were ones already in motion before his organization started staring down budget challenges.
“There’s nothing about our funding situation that is causing us to knee-jerk, pivot, or reassess our mission or what we do,” Rubin says. “In fact, some of the things we’re doing now are things we’ve been doing over the last five years.”
To that end, he says BioSTL is looking to host its first fundraising gala in August, partially to broaden the awareness of the organization’s work and potentially appeal to new funders.
“Different aspects might appeal to different funders,” he says. “And there are so many out there that have never even heard of us, partly because we have relied on a small number of funders. And only in the last two years have we really been trying to get out and get the word more out.”
