Life Sciences Financings and Commentary #36
Tags: Venture Capital, Biotechnology, Investing, Healthcare, Business

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Life Sciences Financings and Commentary #36 — November 28, 2020 — December 4, 2020

Financings

Number of deals: 15 & Total capital invested: $750.4M

- Avant Meats raised $3.1M led by China Venture Capital, AngelHub, and ParticleX to develop cultured fish meat products.

- Elevian raised $15M led by Prime Movers Lab to develop new drugs targeting GDF11 for age-related diseases.

- Everlywell raised $175M from Blackrock, Foresite Capital, Lux Capital, among others to scale their at-home testing kit business. Congrats Julia.

- Genesis Therapeutics raised $52M led by Rock Springs Capital to use their machine learning platform for ADMET and docking predictions for drug design. Congrats Evan.

- Impact Therapeutics raised $50M led by Junshi Biosciences to develop their pipeline: a Wee-1 inhibitor and PARP inhibitor in oncology.

- Loop Health raised $2.3M led by Sierra Ventures to build a health insurance product in India.

- MedArrive raised $4.5M with Kleiner Perkins and Define Ventures co-leading the round to build a software product for at-home care.

- Noema Pharma raised $60M led by Sofinnova Partners and Polaris Partners take four clinical-stage assets it has in-licensed from Roche for orphan neurological indications that fall outside of Roche’s strategic focus — https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/12/01/2137081/0/en/Noema-Pharma-raises-CHF54-million-in-Series-A-financing-round-led-by-Sofinnova-Partners-and-Polaris-Partners.html

- Olive raised $225.5M led by Tiger Global to scale their robotic process automation (RPA) products in healthcare.

- Proscia raised $23M led by Scale Venture Partners to build their pathology analysis software product.

- Resolution Therapeutics raised $36M from Syncona to develop macrophage cell therapies for liver cirrhosis.

- Rubedo Life Sciences raised $12M led by Khosla Ventures to develop senolytic medicines for age-related diseases. Congrats Marco.

- Segmed raised $2M led by Blumberg Capital to build a data platform for healthcare machine learning companies; similar to Scale AI. Congrats Cailin.

- Spotlight Therapeutics raised $30M led by GV to grow their platform for non-viral in vivo gene editing.

- Virta Health raised $60M from Sequoia Capital Global Equities to scale their curative digital health product for type 2 diabetes patients.

Exits

Number of exits: 2 & Total exit value: Over $1.5B

- Certara filed to raise a $500M IPO to grow their software platform for PK/PD prediction and other drug development tasks; the business generates over $200M in annual revenue — https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1827090/000110465920131754/tm2030105-12_s1a.htm

- Seer announced a $150M IPO to scale their proteomics research and tools platform — https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1726445/000162828020016863/seers-1a1.htm

Deals

Number of deals: 2 & Total deal value: ~$1.86B

- Artios Pharma announced a deal with Merck KGaA to develop small-molecule DNA nuclease inhibitors. The deal is up to eight targets with Artios receiving $30M in up-front and near-term milestones to take the programs to the point at which Merck will decide on its option to take them in-house. For any products that make it to market, Artios will receive up to $860M in milestones along with double-digit royalties on sales — https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/merck-kgaa-darmstadt-germany-and-artios-pharma-announce-a-global-strategic-collaboration-on-novel-dna-damage-response-targets-in-oncology-301185247.html

- Frontier Medicines announced a deal with AbbVie to use the former’s chemoproteomics platform to identify small molecules for programs directed to new E3 ligases and certain oncology and immunology targets. AbbVie will pay Frontier an upfront cash payment of $55M, and Frontier is eligible to receive additional milestone payments. Frontier will retain an option to share development activities and expenses for certain oncology programs through the completion of phase 2. Frontier will be eligible to receive success-based development and commercial milestone payments that could potentially exceed $1B in addition to royalty payments on commercialized products. AbbVie retains the right to expand the collaboration in the future by exercising options to a defined number of additional targets — https://www.bioworld.com/articles/500863-in-rugged-e3-space-abbvie-delivers-frontier-justice-the-good-kind-via-1b-plus-deal?v=preview

I used to play football a long time ago — I had some decent success mainly because of my teammates with some of them playing in the NFL. Every practice, every game was an existential fight. I’m not that athletic so every year some 6’4 monster would show up trying to take my spot. Similarly, all of these companies are fighting for their right to exist whether they raised $1M or $100M. Building a great business requires passion and focus. A really powerful and useful framework to lead groups of people and win was developed by Bill Walsh — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd_CnRkKOqA