Celine Halioua On The Science and Business of Making Dogs Live Longer

Hey, everybody. This is Ben Kesnoka, cofounder and partner at Village Global, a network driven venture firm. And this is our podcast where we go deep on all things business and technology with world leading experts. Thanks so much for joining us today, Celine. Great to have you on. Excited to be here. So to start, I'd love to just hear a little bit about this founding of the company. Can you tell me a little bit about your own history kind of up to the point where the company began? Oh my god. I mean, how long do we have? Do you want, like, the TLDR? Do we want the TLDR? The TLDR? Okay. I got into college for art school. Summer before I started, had a total, like, existential crisis, realized that, you know, biology in our bodies and health is actually the determinant of our free will and switched to neuroscience, got really interested in the biology of aging, worked on the biology of aging for a while, became obsessed with how could we get the first drug approved that's not just targeting end stage disease, but instead the processes by which we break down and age over time. Initially, I was doing that in humans, worked on human biology and venture and otherwise for a while, and then realized, actually, I think the best way to get a longevity drug through to market and to the consciousness writ large was to go dogs first. And I guess, like, while all of this is happening, there's, like, a parallel path of, like, I'm a crazy animal person. So it all kinda worked out really well. Dogs, cats, horses. All of the above. Squirrels, turtles, catchers. My dog does not like squirrels. Squirrels and dogs is a dangerous mix. It is a dangerous mix. Thankfully, there are no squirrels today, but I may or may not have had, we used to rescue a lot of, like, wild animals when I grew up in Texas. And so we definitely had baby squirrels. There was one living in my aunt's house. It was it was a thing. That's very Texas. Yes. It truly, truly very Texas. That's amazing. And can you tell me a little bit about the state of Loyal today? Like, how many people is it? What are the products that you have? Like, just what does the business look like? So I'd say we're, like, a mid stage consumer biotech company working on developing the first FDA approved drugs for lifespan extension, going dogs first. We have raised now over a quarter of $1,000,000,000, which is honestly, like, a combination of interesting, exciting, and terrifying to say out loud. Unpack that. Well, it's like, okay. It's like, holy shit. Like, if you had told me, you know, five or six years ago and I started loyal, and I was like, oh my god. I raised $5,000,000 seed. Wow. Like, that's crazy. If you had told me that …