Kai Micah Mills
Kai Micah Mills is Founder and CEO of Cryopets, Cofounder of CryoDAO and HydraDAO, and a Thiel Fellow. A cosmist, he has built technology companies since 2012 and now develops, funds, and builds infrastructure for biostasis and biological replacement research.
Kai founded Cryopets in January 2022 to offer whole-body cryopreservation for pets as an end-of-life alternative to burial or cremation. After natural death, its surgical teams stabilize the animal, perfuse it with cryoprotective agents, and transport it by cryo ambulance to long-term storage in liquid nitrogen dewars, with revival to be attempted once medicine can treat the original ailment. Now headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, the company started in a garage laboratory in Utah and today runs a lab, warehouse, and office in the Texas Hill Country.
In 2025, it closed a $1.5 million pre-seed round backed by investors including Valyrian, Prelude, and Gaingels, while its waitlist grew past 10,000. Read How Cryopets Raised $1.5M To Beat Death With Cryopreservation, Pet Owners Freeze Their Dying Animals to One Day Bring Them Back to Life and The Tech Messiahs Who Want to Deliver Us from Death.
In September 2022, Kai cofounded CryoDAO, a Zug-based decentralized collective that funds cryopreservation research, with our Emil Kendziorra, our Eli Mohamad, and Vincent Weisser. Governed by holders of its token, CryoDAO reports a treasury above $5 million and more than 6,000 community members. Its funded projects include multi-organ cryopreservation with ultrasound rewarming in a pig model, live births from vitrified and replanted whole ovaries in large mammals, a cryoprotective agent repository, and CRYORAT, the high sub-zero preservation and revival of a small mammal at Advanced Neural Biosciences under Aschwin de Wolf, whose token sale raised $900,000.
The collective's scientific advisers include our Gregory M. Fahy, our João Pedro de Magalhães, our Roman Bauer, and our Ramón Risco. In July 2024, CryoDAO partnered with Molecule to tokenize cryopreservation research as onchain intellectual property. Read Molecule Partners with CryoDAO to Expand Onchain Intellectual Property and Advance Cryopreservation Research.
In September 2024, the CryoDAO founders, joined by Austin T. Lynch and Si Maclennan, launched HydraDAO, whose mission is to enable partial and whole-body biological replacement for humans. Its initial token sale closed in January 2025, and the organization has since funded Kind Bio's integrated organ networks and Dowell Bio's spinal fusogens.
Kai serves on the board of the American Biostasis Foundation, founded in 2025 for basic, translational, and applied research in biostasis, cryobiology, and biopreservation, alongside Kendziorra, Lynch, and Fernando Pinheiro. He oversees operations for the purpose-built cryopreservation research laboratory and long-term storage facility the foundation is developing in Oregon.
In May 2025, CryoDAO and HydraDAO each pledged 100,000 USDC toward the project's initial funding request. Its founding ambassadors include our Eli Mohamad, our Max Marty, and our Laurence Ion. Since May 2026, he has also served on the board of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, a nonprofit founded in 2006 that explores the intersection of science, technology, and religion.
Kai's entrepreneurial career began with Minecraft game servers he ran from his family's basement in Utah. He founded CraftFest in 2012 and was Founder and Lead Developer of Yeti Crew between 2014 and 2015. He then cofounded MyMCServers as CTO in 2015, founded DediFire, which he led as CEO from 2016 to 2017, and cofounded GodlyCloud as CTO in 2017, and all three companies were acquired.
From 2017 to 2019, he was Cofounder and Executive Director of Konjure, and from 2018 to 2020, Founder and Lead Developer of Sitesire. Between 2020 and 2021, he was Cofounder and COO of Branch, a Seattle virtual office platform he started with Dayton Mills that raised $1.6 million from investors including Homebrew and Naval Ravikant, before leaving to focus on longevity.
Kai received the On Deck Longevity Biotech Fellowship in 2021 and the Foresight Institute Fellowship in 2022, and between 2021 and 2022, he built a longevity technology tree under the Foresight Institute and Mapsmap. In February 2023, the Thiel Foundation named him to its Thiel Fellowship, which grants $100,000 over two years.
A regular speaker on cryonics and decentralized science, Kai argued at the Foresight Institute in October 2022 that cryonics should become a standard of care in every hospital, with animal medicine as its proving ground. Watch Kai Micah Mills, CEO of Cryopets | Getting Cryonics to the Masses.
His RAADfest 2026 talk was Funding Radical Life Extension Research with Decentralized Science, and he is listed to speak at the New Worlds Faire in Houston in December 2026 alongside our Aubrey de Grey, our Rick N. Tumlinson, and our Philip T. Metzger.
Watch Eli Mohamad & Kai Micah Mills — Advancing Frontiers of Cryopreservation & Biological Replacement, shared by our Ira S. Pastor. Listen to 87: Cryonics with Kai Micah Mills, #31 He Wants to Save Your Pet with Cryo — The Kai Micah Mills Interview, and CryoDAO on Max More's The Biostasis Standard. Kai grew up in Utah and lives in San Antonio, Texas.
Visit his website, LinkedIn profile, Foresight Institute profile, and GitHub page. Follow him on Facebook, X, Instagram, and YouTube.