Large pools of capital are still flowing into veteran venture firms, despite a three-year downturn with few IPOs and a mostly quiet market for takeovers.
On Thursday morning, Palo Alto-based Frazier Life Sciences announced a new $1.3 billion venture fund. About 40% to 50% of that money will go toward starting new companies, general partner Daniel Estes said in an interview with
Endpoints News
.
The firm is “trying to put more of our money where our mouth is,” Estes said, adding that Frazier believes its company creation deals tend to be its “best deals.” The firm puts together about three to five companies per year, he said.
The new fund, Frazier Life Sciences XII, is about
$300 million larger
than its last venture fund in March 2022. Last October, the firm’s public investing group
also raised more money
.
About 90% of the fund comes from existing limited partners, Estes said, including
institutional investors such as
the New Mexico State Investment Council and Fairfax County Police Officers Retirement System.
Employing the same general strategy and team for more than two decades across multiple funds “really resonated with [the LPs],” he said.
The VC firm isn’t alone in announcing new funds this year, despite the ongoing downturn in biotech. Other blue-chip names like Omega Funds, Sofinnova Partners, Aditum Bio and Deerfield have also uncorked a new fund this year.
Frazier boosted the size of the fund in part because more money is required to build out technologies like antibody-drug conjugates, bispecific antibodies, and other capital-intensive modalities these days, Estes said. Biotech investors are injecting more money upfront into startups so they can get all the way to clinical data to drum up excitement for their next cash infusion, partnership or deal.
“In the current environment, even over the past few years, you want to fund to get clinical data. The development candidate isn’t the step up it used to be. It’s really getting clinical data and looking for M&A, is the thesis we’ve been operating on for a long time,” Estes said.
Some of those new companies will be built around biopharma pipeline spinouts, Estes said. Frazier did such a deal last year when it helped spin out Ascendis Pharma’s technology for use in ophthalmology. The new company,
Eyconis
, got
$150 million
in committed capital.
Estes called the pipeline spinout a “dominant strategy” recently for Frazier.
“It’s a little bit of a function of the current environment where a lot of these public companies don’t have money to do everything they want to do,” Estes said. “If they’re not getting value for assets three, four or five, spinning them off can be a way to get some value, advance those programs and in some ways also be able to deploy people in those companies as a way to decrease costs.”
Bain Capital has also used the tactic recently. This week, it carved out five of Bristol Myers Squibb’s immunology assets, with
$300 million committed
to the unnamed new company.
Frazier also invests in companies built around academic, scientific founders. A recent example is Architect Therapeutics, a startup whose scientific co-founders include Scripps’ Jin-Quan Yu and Ben Cravatt alongside former Vividion chair Rich Heyman. It’s led by CEO Angie You, who previously led Frazier-backed
Amunix
.
Backed by Frazier, ARCH Venture Partners and others, Architect is working on “the Guggenheim of small molecule drugs” with a platform that turns dormant carbon-hydrogen (C-H) bonds “into powerful building blocks of novel drug architectures,” according to its website.
Frazier’s Anna Chen, speaking in a joint interview with Estes, said the firm is also looking for opportunities to source assets from China.
“We think it’s going to be a great source for assets,” Chen said. “Much like you look at the third or fourth pipeline asset from [a] US publicly-traded biotech, Chinese companies are very productive.”
China has become a growing source of new therapeutic candidates for US and European drug developers, with many Western biopharmas making headline-grabbing licensing and collaboration deals.
The firm does not have employees in China, Chen said.
Chen was promoted to partner in conjunction with the launch of the new fund. Estes pointed out that four of the firm’s five venture investing partners started as associates at Frazier. “We’ve got a track record of being able to promote and be successful at the partner level,” he said.
The California-based firm opened its Boston office earlier this summer, and also has offices in Palo Alto, San Diego and Seattle.