December 15, 2016
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Flagship Ventures, the company behind the launch of Moderna Therapeutics, Denali Therapeutics, Editas Medicine and more, will start the new year with a new name and a $285 million fund for its startup ventures.
Flagship Ventures has changed its name to Flagship Pioneers to reflect its focus on starting companies aimed at developing transformative therapies, the company announced this morning. While the new name is more representative of what the company is about, its new funding mechanism is where the company will see future benefits. The new $285 million Special Opportunities Fund will operate alongside Flagship’s $585 million Fund V. Those two funds combined provide about $870 million to deploy the next generation of Flagship companies. In total, Flagship has six venture funds of about $1.75 billion in total assets. Those funds outperformed industry averages in 2016, Flagship said.
Noubar Afeyan, founder and chief executive officer of Flagship, said in a statement the new fund will allow for increased “investment into the growth-phase of select ventures and fuel an accelerated path to value creation while increasing Flagship’s return on pioneering innovation.”
As the company enters its 17th year, Flagship said it anticipates accelerated growth within its current companies, as well as a “robust output of first-in-kind ventures under development within its in-house innovation foundry (VentureLabs).”
Since the launch of Flagship in 2000, the company has launched more than 75 scientific ventures, which has resulted in “$19 billion in aggregate value, 500+ issued patents, 50+ clinical trials and 16 IPOs,” the company said. Flagship launches between six and eight companies per year, the company said.
Looking back over 2016, Flagship highlighted the success of several of its companies, including IPOs for three companies, Selecta Biosciences and Syros Pharmaceuticals.
Messenger RNA company Moderna Therapeutics announced its plans to build a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Massachusetts to support the company’s ongoing and planned clinical trials. Moderna also raised more than $500 million in during 2016. Flagship said Moderna set records for “capital raised and valuation achieved as a private biotech company.”
Denali Therapeutics raised $130 million in Series B financing to advance its work in defeating neurodegenerative diseases, Flagship said.
Some of Flagship’s launched companies have plans for an initial public offering, the company said. It added that others are anticipating new partnerships with larger companies and “global market leaders,” although no specifics were provided.
“Through pioneering, we purposely distance ourselves from current products and advances that represent only a short leap in innovation beyond them; this is the place where industry incumbents and conventional start-ups view it as logical and reasonable to explore for what’s next. Instead, Flagship’s scientific ventures start by exploring unprecedented solutions for unsolved problems representing unproven value opportunities. In doing so, we discover completely new pools of value and realize them for the benefit of society and our partners,” Afeyan said.
