Pivotal bioVenture Partners has closed its second fund of $389 million, money that will go toward North American and European companies working to develop new therapeutics.
The fund brings the VC’s total capital commitments to $689 million.
In the past, Pivotal bioVenture Partners has invested in neuro-focused Karuna Therapeutics and vaccine innovator Vaxcyte, both public companies. The partner VC has also joined Evommune’s $50 million series B and Maplight Therapeutics’ $225 million series C this year.
Pivotal invests in all stages of companies, from seed to publicly listed, and has a preference for contributing leading or co-leading investments and working alongside entrepreneurs.
The new $389 million fund will be used to invest in new companies and attract leaders to guide and grow those companies. Pivotal also plans to use new advances in data analytics and artificial intelligence and to build out a team of technology industry engineers to create tools for optimizing deal sourcing, deal selection, due diligence and portfolio management.
“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,” Rob Hopfner, managing general partner at Pivotal Life Sciences, said in a Dec. 18 release. “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.”
The VC partner was established in 2017 and operates under the Pivotal Life Sciences group, a global healthcare investment firm with more than $2 billion under management. It’s one of the many biopharma-focused funds unveiled this year, joining the likes of Bioluminescence Ventures’ $477 million Funds I and II and Abingworth’s $356 million fund closed over the last few months.