Dimension Therapeutics, Inc.

在关闭首期3.5亿美元基金不到两年后，新锐生命科学风险投资机构Dimension开始募集二期基金，仅用了两个月的时间就筹集到5亿美元，超过了其4亿美元的目标。 “我们首期基金的每一位投资者都很快回来了。”公司创始人兼管理合伙人之一的Zavian Dar说。 Dimension也在二期基金中引入了一些新的投资者，但最终“拒绝了绝大多数表达兴趣的LP”。目前，Dimension的LP名单包括北美和西欧的捐赠基金、基金会、医院、研究机构等。 Dimension创始人兼管理合伙人：Nan Li（图左）、Zavian Dar（图中）、Adam Goulburn（图右） 2022年初，ChatGPT席卷全球，引发人工智能和机器学习革命，Dimension就是在那时成立，并确定了在生命科学和技术的交汇处进行投资的策略。 Zavian Dar声称，Dimension是第一家专门致力于弥合生物学与计算机科学之间差距的VC。 合伙人之一Adam Goulburn表示，Dimension只有在“团队中有25%、30%甚至40%是计算生物学家”的情况下才会投资该生物技术初创公司。“他们是机器学习实践者、人工智能工程师、硬件机器人专家，他们与化学家和生物学家交织在一起，共同协作进行药物开发。” Dimension寻找的是那种具有跨界能力、大胆创新的创始人。 “今天，这种类型的企业家不仅熟悉随机对照试验和RNA疫苗是什么，而且对GLP-1s和肥胖症也了如指掌。”Zavian Dar说到，“我们想找的，是那种在2010年或2011年想要成为下一个Zuck或Evan Spiegel的企业家，在2016年或2017年想要成为下一个Travis并建立一个按需公司（on-demand company）的企业家。” 自成立以来，Dimension已投资了约20家公司，其中约一半目前仍处于隐秘状态。Dimension最初启动时主要关注早期投资，但到目前已经扩展到从创立到上市公司的所有阶段。 合伙人之一Nan Li在接受Endpoints采访时表示，Dimension主要投向支持药物发现的平台公司，以及“驱动生态系统”的软硬件基础设施公司。 Dimension已经公布的“出手”包括：用AI从天然化合物中开发药物的Enveda Biosciences，上个月完成了1.3亿美元的C轮融资；开发药物发现AI基础模型的Chai Discovery和Kimia Therapeutics，今年9月，Chai在Thrive Capital和OpenAI领投的种子轮融资中筹集了3000万美元；以及实验室自动化公司Automera。 Dimension表示，二期基金将会在下个季度开始运营，预计投向20~24个生物技术初创公司。 参考资料： [1] TechCrunch：Dimension raises $500M second fund for investing at the intersection of tech and life sciences [2]Endpoints News：Dimension nabs $500M second fund for 'still contrary' intersection of bio and machine learning 推荐阅读 Atlas风投年度展望：从中国获得创新至关重要 风投机构venBio完成5.28亿美元募资 Copyright © 2024 PHARMCUBE. All Rights Reserved. 欢迎转发分享及合理引用，引用时请在显要位置标明文章来源；如需转载，请给微信公众号后台留言或发送消息，并注明公众号名称及ID。 免责申明：本微信文章中的信息仅供一般参考之用，不可直接作为决策内容，医药魔方不对任何主体因使用本文内容而导致的任何损失承担责任。

Dimension has crossed a key threshold. The VC firm’s trio of New York and Bay Area managing partners has raised a sophomore fund in the arduous field of life sciences investing. That group — Zavain Dar, Nan Li and Adam Goulburn — raised $150 million more than their inaugural $350 million fund, and they did it quite quickly. The data room opened in August and the fund closed in October. They blew past a $400 million target and brought together all existing limited partners for their hard cap of $500 million, they told Endpoints News . They celebrated, and immediately got to work, at a team off-site in recent days and are now out with the fundraising news on Monday morning. They’ll likely start deploying the new fund next quarter, Li said in an interview. The fund announcement comes a few days after long-time biotech VC Atlas Venture unveiled its $450 million 14th fund, deciding to stay “disciplined” with a capital pool equal in size to its previous fund. Endpoints News reported on both Atlas’ and Dimension’s fundraising plans last month and October, respectively. North American and Western European endowments, foundations, hospitals, research institutions and others serve as LPs in the fund, Dar said. Raising the second pool wasn’t the difficult part, despite that being such a hurdle for many other sophomore fundraisers. It was “down-selecting for how to actually Tetris into that 500 number” that was the main hiccup, Dar said. Dimension was initially unveiled in January 2022. That was within days of ChatGPT taking the world by storm and opening up an AI and machine learning revolution that had been in development under the woodwork for years. It was also one of the “deepest troughs in biotech history from a capital markets perspective,” Dar said in an interview. The team weathered through it. They’re building a VC firm that backs both drug discovery platform companies as well as the software and hardware startups that “power the ecosystem,” Li said. “We try very much to be multidisciplinary and hold all aspects of this industry with equal importance,” Li said. Those initial investments have included plant chemistry-inspired Enveda Biosciences , lab automation company Automata, AI foundation model-based Chai Discovery and Kimia Therapeutics , the next bet from the founder of Roche-acquired Carmot Therapeutics. A biologics manufacturing platform company is also in stealth mode. “People are now paying more attention to techbio, or bio and machine learning, than they were two years ago,” Dar said. “I think it’s still contrary to be investing in this way. The tension still is not where it should be.” And that’s OK. For Dimension, at least. “It allows us to create our community. It allows us to take our time building the firm,” Dar continued. “But inevitably, this small, niche practice that we’re building today, within the next decade, this will be the way life science investing and company building is done.” At the outset of the first fund, the trio got together and created a whiteboard with a “dream list” of entrepreneurs they’d like to work with. It’s an “evergreen board,” Li said. “We put those names on a board, and then we went globally to go and access them,” Dar said. “We were extremely fortunate to find alignment with the vast majority of them and partner with them.” Entrepreneurs at about 20 to 24 startups will benefit from Dimension’s second fund, Goulburn said. He said he and his fellow managing partners are able to speak the same language as their entrepreneurs, noting their scientific and computational backgrounds. Nobody in the trio has an MBA. Dimension seeks bold founders. “The same ilk of entrepreneur who might have in 2010 or 2011 wanted to be the next Zuck or Evan Spiegel, maybe in 2016 or 2017 wanted to be the next Travis and build an on-demand company,” Dar said. “That exact same kind of entrepreneurial phenotype today is familiar with not only what a randomized control trial is and RNA vaccine is, but is also intimately familiar with GLP-1s and obesity.” “That imagination has really captured the zeitgeist of what life sciences/therapies/medicines are,” he continued, “and it’s really unlocked just a tremendous fire hose of immensely talented, amazing people who are inevitably going to alter the trajectory of humanity within the next two decades.”

Biotech startup Enveda has raised a $130 million Series C, the Colorado company said Thursday morning. Founded and led by early Recursion employee Viswa Colluru, the startup will use the funds to back its pipeline of 10 drug development candidates, including one that entered human studies last month. The new financing will get the 250-employee startup to clinical proof-of-concept for three to five of those candidates, Colluru said in a phone interview on Thursday. That includes a once-daily, oral obesity drug that will enter human trials around the middle of next year, he said. The five-year-old company maps the chemistry of plants and employs machine learning and other methods to create therapeutics based on those insights. Enveda believes nature can serve as the foundation for a new generation of medicines, just as morphine, aspirin, metformin, warfarin and others have all come from nature. “It’s funny, when you think about the core of Enveda being natural products, every pharma company would scoff at that and be like, ‘Look, we tried that. It’s not an interesting place,’” Shaquille Vayda, principal at Lux Capital, told Endpoints News last year. Enveda entered the clinic last month with its first drug candidate, ENV-294, an experimental oral treatment for atopic dermatitis, among other inflammatory indications. The drug has attracted pharma interest, Colluru said, noting the company could explore partnerships on some of its programs. It had expected to enter human trials in 2023, Colluru told Endpoints at the time of a December 2022 Series B announcement. Beyond anti-inflammatories, Enveda is also working in obesity (with a hormone mimetic), multiple forms of fibrosis, chronic pain and neurological indications. It’s working on MRGPRX4 antagonists, NLRP3 and TL1A pathway inhibitors, and TGR5 agonists, among others. With the new funds, Enveda has now raised a total of $360 million from Lux Capital, Dimension Capital , Microsoft, Kinnevik, Baillie Gifford and multiple other investors. And it has grown quickly: Colluru previously told Endpoints he initially invested $50,000 of his own money into the company alongside $220,000 from friends and family. He said the company now has flexibility with regard to its next financing step. “The potential here is massive, but there’s enough wood to chop just on the therapeutics side, where I think there’s a $50 billion company to be built just on therapeutics alone in the next decade,” Zavain Dar, a co-founder of VC firm Dimension, previously told Endpoints. The company also has a footprint in India, where Colluru grew up.