Are you interested in monitoring the US venture capital funding in our sector? Look no further than PwC’s MoneyTree report. The company offers a quarterly report that breaks down deals by quarter, stages and venture capital outlook for the life science sector. The most recent report, Q316, indicates that venture capitalists invested $2.5 billion in 156 life science companies during the third quarter which was down from $3.0 billion in 210 deals during the same quarter of 2015. The silver lining was that the average deal size increased by 12% in comparison. Even with this slightly downward trend, the life science sector is right behind the software sector in terms of amount of money invested.
In the Boston Venture Capital scene, Q416 was an active quarter. Third Rock Ventures and Flagship Ventures raised new funds which could be good news for entrepreneurs in the coming years. In October, Third Rock Third Rock closed its “Fund IV,” raising $616 million. They also created a splash soon after by launching Goldfinch Bio, a $55M investment in a company that will leverage genomic and phenotypic data, to help with the discovery of molecular drivers of kidney disease. Not to be out-done, in December, Noubar Afeyan and the team at Flagship closed a $285 million fund and renamed the company Flagship Pioneering. And one of the most exciting investment stories to close 2016, is that Bayer and Versant Ventures funded one of the biggest Series A rounds in our sector's history by launching BlueRock Therapeutics with a $225M series A round. This new start up is hailed as a ground-breaking regenerative medicine company with a mission to develop novel induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) therapies. In closing, more to come on all fronts next month when life science investors and entrepreneurs meet at the 35th Annual JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, January 9-13, 2017.