Kronos Bio Raises $155 Million In Private Financing

By Annie Baker • Aug 25, 2020
  • Kronos Bio announced private financing of about $155 million of convertible notes with $148 million in funding received to date and the remaining $7 million to be funded by mid-September pursuant to binding commitments

Kronos Bio – a private clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the discovery and development of novel cancer therapeutics designed to transform patient outcomes through a precision medicine strategy by targeting dysregulated transcription – announced private financing of about $155 million of convertible notes with $148 million in funding received to date and the remaining $7 million to be funded by mid-September pursuant to binding commitments.

This round of funding was led by Perceptive Advisors and included funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Inc., funds affiliated with Casdin Partners, Commodore Capital, EcoR1 Capital, Fidelity Management and Research Company, Surveyor Capital (a Citadel company), funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Woodline Partners, and a large diversified asset manager on the west coast as well as existing investors including GV (formerly Google Ventures), Invus, Nextech Invest, Omega Funds, Polaris Partners, and Vida Ventures, LLC.

“We appreciate the strong support from this group of investors and believe this capital will help propel Kronos through our upcoming period of clinical development,” said Norbert Bischofberger, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer of Kronos. “Importantly, this capital will help advance our lead spleen tyrosine kinase (SYK) inhibitor, which we recently acquired from Gilead, including potentially into a registrational trial in 2021. It will also help us advance our second lead pipeline candidate, KB-0742, a differentiated CDK9 inhibitor, into a Phase 1/2 clinical trial for treatment of MYC-amplified solid tumors, as well as to further invest in our product discovery engine to drive multiple oncology programs targeting dysregulated transcription factors.”

Jefferies LLC had acted as the sole placement agent for the financing.