The Altman Network

Investigation Events

Persons of Interest and Profiles

Sam Altman Self-Dealing & Conflict Architecture

TQ Ventures

Co-founded by Scooter Braun, Schuster Tanger, and Andrew Marks; investor in Formation Bio’s October 2018 venture round; entertainment-industry venture fund with health, wellness, and consumer tech portfolio focus.

TQ Ventures is a New York City–based early-stage venture firm founded in 2018 by Schuster Tanger, Andrew Marks, and Scooter Braun. The firm manages over $2 billion in assets across three funds and has made 126+ investments globally across consumer tech, fintech, healthcare, software, and gaming. The firm is currently led by Tanger and Marks, with Braun serving in a co-founding capacity [1] [2].

Tanger and Marks are described as “longtime friends who share a passion for investing.” Marks previously worked at Freemark Partners and Blue Ridge Capital, both hedge funds, bringing institutional investment discipline to the firm. The team’s stated approach is “industry-agnostic” investing from “first principles,” prioritizing founder quality over sector-specific expertise [3].

Notable portfolio companies include Clubhouse (social audio), Noom (behavioral health and weight management), Kindbody (fertility services), Liquid IV (hydration supplements, acquired by Unilever), and Sanity Group (cannabis). Successful exits include Liquid IV and Clubhouse. The portfolio leans toward health, wellness, and consumer-facing technology — sectors where celebrity co-founders provide media visibility and consumer brand expertise that traditional VCs cannot [4].

Formation Bio Investment

TQ Ventures invested in TrialSpark’s October 2018 venture round alongside Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Sound Ventures, Felicis Ventures (Wesley Chan), and Cherubic Ventures. This was the round that first expanded the investor base beyond the seed-stage Sequoia/Thrive pair, bringing entertainment-industry capital and cross-sector deal flow into the clinical trials company [5].

TQ Ventures is not listed on the Series C (September 2021) or Series D (June 2024) investor sheets. This suggests the firm’s involvement was limited to the early stage and it did not maintain a continuous position through the company’s evolution from clinical trial tech into pharmaceutical acquisition. Whether TQ exited, was diluted, or simply chose not to participate in later rounds is unknown.

The Scooter Braun Node

Braun’s primary public profile is in entertainment management — he is best known as the manager of Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, and other artists, and for his controversial 2019 acquisition of Big Machine Records, which included Taylor Swift’s master recordings. The acquisition generated significant public backlash and positioned Braun as a polarizing figure in the entertainment industry [6].

Braun’s relevance to the Formation Bio investigation is as a network node rather than a direct operational link. Both TQ Ventures and Sound Ventures (Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary) represent the same channel: entertainment-industry wealth entering healthcare and clinical trial development through early-stage venture positions. Celebrity co-founded VC funds provide reputational reach and media relationships that complement the institutional capital from Sequoia, Thrive, and a16z. When a clinical trials company has Scooter Braun, Ashton Kutcher, and Guy Oseary among its early investors, that roster serves as a signal to later-stage institutional investors that the company has broad cultural visibility and media access — both of which are relevant to patient recruitment for clinical trials, which depends on public-facing awareness and trust.

The combination of entertainment industry (Braun), hedge fund (Marks at Blue Ridge Capital and Freemark Partners), and entrepreneurial (Tanger) backgrounds mirrors the cross-sector composition seen in other Formation Bio investors. John Doerr (Series C), Lachy Groom (Series C co-lead), and Emerson Collective/Laurene Powell Jobs (Series D) similarly represent capital from adjacent industries entering pharmaceutical development through the Altman network’s deal flow.

Nodes / Open Questions

  • What is the current status of TQ’s TrialSpark/Formation Bio holding? Exited, diluted, or held without participating in later rounds?
  • Braun’s public profile has diminished since the Taylor Swift controversy. Has his role at TQ changed operationally, or is he still an active co-founding partner?
  • Noom (TQ portfolio company) uses behavioral science and AI for health interventions. Does Noom’s health-behavior-modification model overlap with Formation Bio’s patient recruitment AI (Muse)?
  • Kindbody (TQ portfolio, fertility services) collects sensitive reproductive health data. Does TQ’s portfolio concentration in health data companies (Kindbody, TrialSpark/Formation Bio, Noom) represent a deliberate data-adjacent investment thesis?
  • Andrew Marks’s hedge fund background (Blue Ridge Capital, Freemark Partners) — do either of these funds have positions in pharma companies that Formation Bio has licensed drugs to or acquired drugs from?

Sources

  1. [Archive] (https://tq.vc/)
  2. [Archive] (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tq-ventures)
  3. [Archive] (https://tq.vc/team)
  4. [Archive] (https://superscout.co/investor/tq-ventures-2)
  5. [Archive] (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kareemzaki)
  6. [Archive] (https://scooterbraun.com/investments)