Despite having 47 IPOs, 28 M&As and 58 FDA-approved drugs under its belt, the 13-year-old multi-stage healthcare and life sciences firm took two years to raise its sixth fund.
On Wednesday, Foresite announced that it closed its sixth fund with $900 million.
Last summer, Foresite co-led a $115 million Series F into CG Oncology, a drug discovery company that had a successful IPO listing in January.
Foresite intends to back about 20 companies from its sixth fund, writing checks from a couple of million up to $75 million.
“Over a decade ago, we named the firm Foresite because we thought we had an idea of where healthcare was headed,” Tananbaum said.
The folks at Collaborative Fund certainly like a challenge.
Oh, and they decided to raise their sixth flagship fund at a time when limited partners have grown more miserly.
Collaborative recently raised $125 million for its sixth flagship fund, the firm exclusively told TechCrunch, completing the process in just over 90 days.
“This fundraising environment is tougher than any I’ve seen since starting the firm well over a decade ago,” founder and managing partner Craig Shapiro told TechCrunch.
Part of that could be the fact that Collaborative has recently returned capital to its LPs, Shapiro said.
Today they are the co-founders of Cherub, a marketplace that pairs angel investors with entrepreneurs.
Johnson likens Los Angeles-based Cherub to Raya, an online membership-based community for dating, in that it matches founders and angel investors based on their preferences.
Or if an entrepreneur’s minimum investment is $25,000 but an angel investor is only investing $10,000 per deal, they can see that and not reach out to connect.
Of those deals, 40% were new angel investors, meaning they were accredited investors that had never written checks before.
Angel investor Allen Orr told TechCrunch that he had used other platforms such as AngelList in the past.
When prolific venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Lerer Hippeau announced in early 2024 they were pivoting away from consumer tech, it sparked a social media debate about whether there are still opportunities.
Jumping in, Maven will be there helping to build the next game-changing health AI company or robotics AI consumer business, he said.
Scheinman started the firm in 2013 and brought in Deshpande soon after to focus on consumer AI and personalized medicine.
They brought in investment partner Robert Ravanshenas in 2015, and again in 2020 after a stint in a startup operating role, to focus on fintech, longevity and consumer AI.
Together the trio remains committed to seeding similar consumer tech trends, including applications of AI, personalized healthcare, climate and sustainability, family technology and fintech.
Investors and founders can meet their match with Cherub, the ‘Raya of angel investing’Jaclyn Johnson and Angeline Vuong were on a hike deliberating how hard it can be for people to get started in angel investing when they realized they had stumbled upon a startup idea.
Today they are the co-founders of Cherub, a marketplace that pairs angel investors with entrepreneurs.
Johnson likens Los Angeles-based Cherub to Raya, an online membership-based community for dating, in that it matches founders and angel investors based on their preferences.
Of those deals, 40% were new angel investors, meaning they were accredited investors that had never written checks before.
Angel investor Allen Orr told TechCrunch that he had used other platforms such as AngelList in the past.
For the firm that calls itself “the first check in deep tech,” the last check for SOSV’s latest $306 million fund took a bit longer than founder Sean O’Sullivan would have liked.
“We’re concentrating and double doubling down on deep tech,” O’Sullivan said.
We’re doing a fewer number of companies, more like 80 deep tech companies per year.
O’Sullivan said that SOSV intends to invest about 70% of the funds in climate tech companies, 25% in health tech, and the remaining 5% will be reserved for opportunistic investments.
“We have a special place to serve because we do deep tech, because we do get into the biology, we do get into the chemistry, the physics and the electronics.
Metalab goes from quietly building the internet to investing in itNearly 20 years after finding success in helping startups build products, Canadian interface design firm Metalab launches Metalab Ventures to invest in many of those product-led startups.
Then Metalab “lets them loose” to grow, CEO Luke Des Cotes told TechCrunch.
With Metalab Ventures, the venture arm will play the role of a long-term value investor, essentially “putting our money where our mouth is,” Des Cotes said.
When determining who to invest in Metalab Ventures, the process includes getting to know the founders and if the firm can add value.
“We’ve already operated very much like a venture fund,” Des Cotes said.
Hello, and welcome to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Friday episode, in which we dig through the most critical stories and themes from the week.
But while the SBF news was a big deal, there was so very much more to cover on today’s news roundup episode of Equity.
We also dug into two companies building startups focused around kids.
Then, to wrap up, a look at just who unicorn founders really are, and a new $100 million fund that to back climate tech.
All VC firms have also grown increasingly focused on making early-stage investments in India in recent years and finding the next Flipkart at the seed stage.
Accel has been trying to find the right fit for its early-stage accelerator program for nearly half a decade now.
SkoobSkoob is a generative AI platform which is revolutionizing the way readers interact with books.
More than 800 startups applied to be in Atoms 3.0, and about 300-400 applicants were AI startups.
Swaroop said nearly two-thirds of all pitches focused on AI startups that sought to solve HR and marketing problems.
Observe — not to be confused with Observe.AI — builds observability tools for machine-generated data that aims to break down data silos, useful for developers to understand how apps are working, being used, and potentially failing.
The main use case for Observe today is to analyze data to troubleshoot when an application is not working as it should be.
It’s very permissive.” The company today works with third-parties to enhance that work but he doesn’t rule out native applications in these and other areas down the line.
“We see it as a lever to unlock new customers,” he said of the investment thesis of Snowflake Ventures.
[In data,] there is nothing that competes with Observe right now,” Williams added.
