Santé Ventures, a healthcare and life sciences investment firm specializing in early-stage companies, announced Wednesday it has closed a $250 million fund.
This is Santé Venture’s third fund, since its founding in 2006. The firm is based in Austin and has an office in Houston.
Fund III has “secured capital commitments from over 30 limited partners, including the previously announced new investor, Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System (“PSERS”). Investors in previous funds accounted for approximately one-half of the total capital,” according to a news release.
Sante’s founding partners previously ran “Ascension Health, one of the largest healthcare systems in the country with $22 billion in revenue; created Ascension Health Ventures I, a $125 million corporate healthcare venture fund; and helped establish a healthcare practice at Austin Ventures, a top-tier venture firm with $3.9 billion in capital under management,” according to its website.
“We are grateful for the trust and confidence investors have placed in us with their capital. We are also pleased to have broadened our base of institutional limited partners with the addition of sovereign wealth funds, investors from Europe and Asia, and several new preeminent healthcare delivery systems,” Kevin Lalande, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Santé Ventures, said in a news release. “Over the last decade, we have proven and continued to refine our unique portfolio strategy, which is designed to engineer the luck out of fund-level venture capital returns. Our multi-disciplinary investment team partners with exceptional entrepreneurs to build innovative companies with the potential to deliver better health outcomes at lower total cost, without relying on exits at unicorn valuations to generate attractive returns for our investors.”
With the latest fund, Santé Ventures plans to invest in 20 to 25 companies. It has already invested in Cryosa for the treatment of sleep apnea, DyaMC for the treatment of Type II Diabetes and Geneos Therapeutics, a neoantigen-based personalized cancer therapy.
To date, Santé Ventures has made investments into 33 companies including Claret Medical (Boston Scientific), TVA Medical (Becton Dickinson), Millipede Medical (Boston Scientific), Molecular Templates (MTEM), AbVitro (Celgene) and Explorys (IBM Corp).
