Eir Ventures tops up life sciences fund with $138M for Nordic biotechs

Swedish ven­ture cap­i­tal man­ag­er Eir Ven­tures has round­ed up a to­tal of $138 mil­lion for its life sci­ences fund Eir Ven­tures I AB.

The fund — launched just last year — is the firm’s first ded­i­cat­ed life sci­ences ven­ture cap­i­tal fund, ac­cord­ing to a com­pa­ny state­ment. Backed by a syn­di­cate of in­vestors such as the Eu­ro­pean In­vest­ment Fund (EIF), No­vo Hold­ings, and new blue-chip in­vestors such as the Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment Um­brel­la Fund (SDUF), the fund claims to in­vest in life sci­ence com­pa­nies ‘with prod­ucts and tech­nolo­gies ad­dress­ing sig­nif­i­cant un­met med­ical needs,’ ac­cord­ing to a com­pa­ny state­ment.

Stephan Christ­gau, one of the founders of No­vo Seeds, start­ed Eir Ven­tures last year along­side three oth­er vet­er­an VCs — An­dreas Segerros, Mag­nus Pers­son and Aman­da Hay­ward.

In an in­ter­view with End­points News last year af­ter they launched and had their first close at $85 mil­lion, Segerros cit­ed in­creas­ing costs of do­ing busi­ness in the US hubs — from his per­spec­tive, those costs were start­ing to get pro­hib­i­tive. Be it re­al es­tate, salary or drug de­vel­op­ment, you can do more with your dime in the ar­eas Eir Ven­tures would be op­er­at­ing in.

Eir Ven­tures has par­tic­i­pat­ed in nine in­vest­ments since it start­ed — all tied to uni­ver­si­ties in the Nordic re­gion. Com­pa­nies such as Pret­zel Ther­a­peu­tics, Ar­gus­Eye and ISD Im­munotech are just sev­er­al of the biotechs that Eir Ven­tures had been a part of.

Ar­guably, the most fa­mil­iar com­pa­ny that Eir has been in­volved with is IO Biotech, the Dan­ish out­fit that raised more than $154 mil­lion ear­li­er this year in an over­sub­scribed Se­ries B to ad­vance im­mune-mod­u­lat­ing can­cer vac­cines in­to the clin­ic — lat­er rais­ing an ad­di­tion­al $115 mil­lion af­ter go­ing pub­lic on Nas­daq in Oc­to­ber un­der the tick­er $IOBT. Eir al­so joined in on Galec­to’s $64M raise, co-lead­ing the round back in Sep­tem­ber 2020 be­fore they went pub­lic a month lat­er un­der the tick­er $GLTO.

‘We thank our loy­al and new in­vestors for their trust in Eir Ven­tures,’ said Eir Ven­tures chair­man and found­ing part­ner Mag­nus Pers­son. ‘The close of Eir Ven­tures I AB is an im­por­tant mile­stone for us and a trib­ute to our in­vestors.’
https://endpts.com/eir-ventures-tops-up-life-sciences-fund-with-138m-for-nordic-biotechs/