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New Investor Gives Boost to Underrepresented Entrepreneurs
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By Brian Gormley, WSJ Pro
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Good day. New venture firm 444 Capital seeks to raise the profile of women- and minority-founded startups in healthcare and other sectors by connecting them with celebrities to help promote their brands.
The firm, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, formed this year and has raised $25 million from the D’Amelio family, which has a program on Hulu called “The D’Amelio Show,” co-Managing Partners Doug Renert and Jeff Beacher, and outside investors.
Its initial investments include Incredible Health, a career marketplace for healthcare workers, which is led by a Black woman, co-founder and Chief Executive Iman Abuzeid.
Mr. Renert, who previously co-founded venture firm Tandem Capital, and Mr. Beacher, who has a history of connecting companies with celebrities, came up with the idea for 444 Capital last year, Mr. Renert said. The firm's name is a reference to good fortune and positive outcomes in numerology, he added.
Their initial vision was to invest in startups and pair them with celebrities who could amplify their message. But as 444 came together, they decided to use their influence to help women and minority entrepreneurs, he said. The firm will invest most of its capital in companies founded by women and other underrepresented groups, Mr. Renert said.
For their first fund, they teamed up with the D’Amelio family, but 444 also intends to launch sister funds in which it joins with other celebrities interested in supporting women- and minority-founded businesses, Mr. Renert said.
The firm is also looking at startups in areas such as mental health and those that bring traditional healthcare online, Mr. Renert said.
Across sectors, there aren’t as many companies founded by women and minorities as the firm would like to see, he said.
“We are trying to help increase the number in healthcare and other industries as much as we can,” Mr. Renert added.
And now on to the news...
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Vial Health Technology co-founders, Chief Executive Simon Burns, left, and Chief Revenue Officer Andrew Brackin. PHOTO: CARLOS CHAVARRIA
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Clinical trials. Venture firm General Catalyst has led a new investment in Vial Health Technology Inc., a startup whose technology and services are designed to help biotechnology companies run faster and more-efficient clinical trials.
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General Catalyst has led a $67 million Series B round of financing for San Francisco-based Vial. The company, founded in 2020, has raised more than $100 million in total venture funding.
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Clinical trials are an expensive part of drug development, which has spurred investment in companies seeking to help researchers enroll them faster and make participation easier for patients.
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Vial seeks to win over biotech companies with a comprehensive offering that uses technology to streamline tasks such as data collection and services to help researchers find patients who could join clinical trials.
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Elon Musk Says Neuralink Should Be Ready for Human Testing in Six Months
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Elon Musk‘s startup Neuralink Corp. should be ready to test its technology on humans in six months, the entrepreneur said Wednesday during a live-streamed update about progress the company has made with its brain-implant technology, The Wall Street Journal's Daniela Hernandez reports. Neuralink has submitted most of its paperwork to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which oversees medical devices, including neural implants, Mr. Musk said. In 2019, he said the company planned to seek the FDA’s approval for human testing and predicted it could begin as soon as 2020. “We are now confident that the Neuralink device is ready for humans, so timing is a function of working through the
FDA approval process,” Mr. Musk said in a tweet during the event.
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$320 Million
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The potential total consideration that drugmaker AstraZeneca PLC could pay to acquire cancer cellular-therapy startup Neogene Therapeutics Inc.
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GE Puts $31 Billion Value on Spinoff of GE HealthCare Technologies
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General Electric Co. set the terms for the spinoff of its healthcare division, putting an initial value of roughly $31 billion on the soon-to-be-public company, The Wall Street Journal's Thomas Gryta reports. GE said current shareholders would get one share in the new GE HealthCare Technologies Inc. for every three shares they hold in GE. The separation is set for Jan. 3 after the markets close, and the new shares will trade on Nasdaq. The Boston conglomerate plans to split into three separate public companies by early 2024. Following the healthcare spinoff, it plans to separate its aerospace business from its power and renewable-energy units.
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Horizon Therapeutics Fields Takeover Interest From Pharma Giants
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Drugmaker Horizon Therapeutics PLC said it is fielding takeover interest, as large pharmaceutical companies compete for fast-growing medicines to fuel sales, the Journal's Ben Dummett and Laura Cooper report. Horizon, which develops medicines for rare and immune diseases, said it is “engaged in highly preliminary discussions with Amgen Inc., [Johnson & Johnson’s] Janssen Global Services, LLC and Sanofi,” confirming an earlier Wall Street Journal report on takeover interest.
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PitchBook Says It's Time for a New Category
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In a sign of the times, analytics firm PitchBook Data Inc. is introducing a new venture category that it will use in its reports to help account for the massive rounds that (very) late-stage companies raise.
The new category, called the “venture growth stage,” describes any deal that is Series E or later or any venture financing of a company that is at least seven years old and has raised at least six venture rounds, according to PitchBook. Companies that met these criteria in 2021 accounted for roughly 26% of all venture dollars deployed globally, PitchBook added.
Those rounds—raised by private companies that are hardly startups anymore (Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Stripe Inc., etc.)—have been throwing PitchBook’s data out of whack, the company said Thursday in announcing the new metric.
“The late stage has changed considerably since PitchBook’s methodologies to define the venture market were created in the early days of the company,” PitchBook said in an analyst note explaining the new category. “The range of deal sizes and valuations in the late stage has made the stage difficult to analyze, even rendering certain data points useless when speaking about the stage as a whole.”
The move by PitchBook reflects the changing venture landscape in which companies are staying private longer and in doing so raising larger financing rounds and commanding ballooning valuations.
—Marc Vartabedian
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Exits
Publicly traded genome-analysis company Bionano Genomics Inc. agreed to purchase Purigen Biosystems Inc., a nucleic acid sample preparation startup, for $32 million in cash at deal close, with an additional $32 million contingent on the achievement of certain milestones. Pleasanton, Calif.-based Purigen is backed by investors including Agilent Technologies, Cota Capital, 5AM Ventures and Roche Venture Fund.
Pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca PLC has agreed to acquire venture-backed biotechnology company Neogene Therapeutics Inc. to gain access to the startup’s potential cell-therapy treatments for solid tumors. Neogene, which in 2020 raised a $110 million Series A round led by Jeito Capital, is developing T-cell receptor therapeutics that have potential to recognize targets inside cancer cells, including cancer-specific mutations, according to the company. That contrasts with most cell-therapy approaches in oncology, which target proteins expressed on the surface of cancer cells, Neogene said. AstraZeneca will acquire Neogene for a total consideration of up to $320 million, including an initial payment of $200 million and up to $120 million in additional payments. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2023.
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Cajal Neuroscience, a Seattle-based drug discovery startup focused on neurodegenerative disease, launched with $96 million in Series A financing. The Column Group and Lux Capital led the round, which included contributions from Two Sigma Ventures, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Evotec, Alexandria Venture Investments, Dolby Family Ventures and others.
Iecure, a gene-editing company developing therapies for liver disorders, said it has completed a $65 million Series A-1 financing. The financing was co-led by Novo Holdings A/S and LYFE Capital with participation from existing investors Versant Ventures and OrbiMed Advisors. The new financing, coupled with a $50 million raised in the prior Series A financing disclosed in September 2021, brings the company’s total funds raised to $115 million. Iecure said it expects the new funding to enable it to advance its lead drug into clinical trials and achieve early human data readouts. The funding also will help Iecure advance its portfolio of gene-editing treatments for rare liver diseases.
Biotechnology startup Rgenta Therapeutics Inc. said it has raised $52 million in a Series A financing led by AZ-CICC Healthcare Investment Fund. The round also included all existing investors and new investors including Korean Investment Partners and Delos Capital. Rgenta said it has a discovery platform that analyzes human genomics data to identify regulatory sites in RNA molecules that could be modulated by small-molecule drugs. The company then screens for small molecules to target RNAs, with a goal of regulating protein production or altering protein function. Rgenta said it plans to use the funding for efforts including advancing its pipeline of RNA-targeting programs for a range of diseases.
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PHOTO: DARRON CUMMINGS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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