Pivotal Life Sciences: bioVenture Partners Fund II Closes At $389 Million

By Amit Chowdhry ● Dec 21, 2023

Pivotal Life Sciences – a global investment firm dedicated to investing in companies involved in healthcare innovation seeking to improve patient outcomes – recently announced the final close of Pivotal bioVenture Partners Fund II with $389 million in capital commitments.

Fund II will continue Pivotal bioVenture Partners’ core strategy of investing in companies based in North America and Europe to develop innovative and impactful therapeutics. And the establishment of Fund II will enable Pivotal to continue to attract talented leaders to guide and grow these companies in key healthcare and therapeutic areas.

The Fund II closing brought Pivotal bioVenture Partners’ total aggregate capital commitments to $689 million. And Pivotal bioVenture Partners invests in companies at all stages, from seed stage to publicly listed, with a preference for leading or co-leading investments and working alongside entrepreneurs as company builders and active board members.

Pivotal bioVenture Partners invests in established companies developing transformative medicines like Karuna and Vaxcyte and in entirely new companies by providing seed funding and support in company building. And this includes backing experienced entrepreneurs, as they did with their investment in Evommune or pioneering academics, as was the case with their investment in Maplight Therapeutics.

In all of its investments, Pivotal bioVenture Partners aims to be a committed partner supporting portfolio companies throughout their evolution, including in late-stage private rounds, IPOs, and follow-on rounds in the public market.

The Pivotal bioVenture Partners team will utilize the full capabilities of Pivotal Life Sciences’ global investment group, which invests through private, public, and other creative financing vehicles in the general life sciences field. And Pivotal bioVenture Partners will build on the firm’s commitment to and relationships with groundbreaking academic scientists, including those supported by their philanthropic academic grant program directly funding academic investigators research.

Pivotal bioVenture Partners Fund II’s diverse set of limited partners is committed to seeing today’s pioneering scientific innovation translated into improving the lives of patients. And a unique component of Pivotal’s strategy is its dedication to applying the latest advances in data analytics and AI to its investment activities. Specifically, Pivotal built a team of technology industry engineers focused on creating tools designed to optimize deal sourcing, deal selection, due diligence, and portfolio management for its investment team and support resources for management teams in its portfolio companies that it plans to employ in Fund II.

Pivotal bioVenture Partners operates under the broader Pivotal Life Sciences group, which is a life sciences asset management platform focused on investing in therapeutic innovation worldwide across asset classes and spanning all stages of company development, with over $2 billion under management.

KEY QUOTES:

“We believe in the power of outstanding teams and excellent execution. The ongoing dislocation in the markets is creating opportunities to match the best entrepreneurs and drug developers with the most promising therapeutic innovation, a strategy that we are well positioned to execute. We see great opportunities to create value by leveraging the reach of our team’s unique and broad talent network, together with a proven ability to pick winners through different market cycles.”

  • Rob Hopfner, Managing General Partner, Pivotal Life Sciences

“We see this moment as a time of great opportunity in which our team’s historic focus on therapeutics with transformative potential in disease management matches where the biotech market has evolved over the past few years. It’s inspiring to see that technologies that emerged in recent years are now translating into development programs with a line of sight to patient impact, which is at the core of our focus.”

  • Peter Bisgaard, Managing Director, Pivotal Life Sciences