DCVC Bio III closes at $400 million

Six years into DCVC Bio’s journey backing ground-breaking companies at the inter­sec­tion of life sciences and deep tech, it is our immense pleasure to announce that we’ve closed fundraising for our third main fund. That means we’re ready to continue our search for great scientific teams with boundary-pushing ideas for curing disease, extending our health-spans, enabling healthy food at lower cost and climate impact, and more. 

We closed the fund this fall at an over­sub­scribed $400 million. See STAT’s coverage of the news here.

DCVC Bio was founded in 2018 to exploit the promise of AI-enabled platforms to discover new medicines and catalyze a range of other biological break­throughs. We aimed to differ­en­tiate DCVC Bio from most other biotech­nology venture funds by investing not in specific drugs or molecules, but in scientific break­throughs by top innovators, plus computation-enhanced platforms that could generate whole new arrays of treatments or products. 

The starting point for many biotech investors is a drug approaching, or in, the clinic, and the bet is that the advancing candidate molecule will animate an IPO or acquisition that will propel its journey to improve patient lives. But that’s not where we start. We tend to bet on science and teams and a defensible capacity for repeatable, actionable insight, because if we back the right scientific approach, we can break into whole new areas at lower cost, greater speed, and more ensured outcomes.

AbCellera (Nasdaq: ABCL), a DCVC Bio I investment, exemplifies that approach. The company combines single-cell analysis with advanced computation and other tools to build a search engine for therapeutic antibodies. It developed the first COVID-19 antibody treatment within 90 days of the first outbreak in the US and several ground­breaking successors equally swiftly. Meanwhile, Avicenna Biosciences will soon ask the FDA for permission to begin Phase I clinical trials of its novel Rho kinase inhibitors for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and ALS — molecules it discovered using its machine-learning-driven medicinal chemistry platform. 

And before the year is out, Umoja Biopharma will have begun treating its first cancer patients using the first in vivo CAR‑T treatment, which teaches the body’s own immune cells to fight tumors without the costly, lengthy, and hazardous compli­ca­tions of traditional ex vivo CAR‑T therapy. Creyon Bio used its predictive ASO design platform to engineer a splice-correcting molecule to treat a patient in need in 5 months — and at very little cost relative to traditional methods. Likewise, Empirico and its compu­ta­tional target discovery engine is prosecuting its first novel target with an siRNA in the clinic with great initial results.

Outside of the medical field, meanwhile, DCVC Bio portfolio company Sabanto has become a leader in autonomous farming; BioPhero (acquired by FMC) is field-testing its bio-designed pheromones, which reduce crop pest populations by disrupting their mating patterns; MycoWorks is making a durable, beautiful leather alternative from mycelium; and Elo Life is coaxing watermelons and sugar beets to make mogrosides, zero-calorie sweeteners originally found in monk fruit, which grows only in China and northern Thailand. 

DCVC Bio III investments will continue down these non-conformist paths. Radionetics Oncology is working to make radio­therapy treatment more precise by designing small radionu­clide-bearing molecules that attach selectively to the G‑Protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) that are char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally over­ex­pressed by tumor cells. Nilo Ther­a­peu­tics is studying the neural circuits and messenger molecules in the brain that are known to promote or suppress inflam­ma­tion, with the goal of developing drugs to help manage immune disorders such as toxic shock, cytokine storms, rheumatoid arthritis, and other autoimmune diseases.

At DCVC Bio, we’re excited by teams who bring all of a unique biological insight and the ability to generate enormous amounts of actionable data around that insight and the ability to deliver meaningful results more swiftly and cost-effectively. The algorithms these companies build on top of their unique insights and defensible empirical data help them more quickly find the most promising drug candidates or agri­cul­tural products, while spending less money to do it. Only after this de-risking process do they proceed to the clinic or the farm. 

We are deeply privileged to have the opportunity to work with such an exciting group of people — whom we consider friends and partners — and we are already busy putting our freshly raised funds to use supporting the next generation of fascinating biotech companies. With gratitude to our investors, we are hard at work.