Get these analyses to your inbox — https://axialfc.substack.com/ This is a newsletter for new financing events with some simple analysis. More well thought out work can be found at — https://axial.substack.com/ I figured that there is a diversity across desire for frequency of emails.

Axial invests and partners in early-stage life sciences companies. If you or someone you know has a great idea or company in life sciences, Axial would be excited to get to know you and possibly invest in your vision and company — info@axialsprawl.com

April 4, 2020 — April 10, 2020

Financings

Number of deals: 22 & Total capital invested: $739M

- 98point6 raised $43M from Goldman Sachs and others. The company has a text-based mobile app to help patients get primary care. The idea is interesting but probably not valuable as a standalone — primary care is something like 10% of network/hospital revenue. This is more of a leadgen tool for them so 98point6 will need to expand to referrals and other tasks to grow into a large business.

- Amphista Therapeutics raised $7.5M led by Advent Venture Partners. The company is another one to put their hat in the ring for protein degradation for oncology similar to Arvinas and others — https://www.insider.co.uk/news/amphista-therapeutics-secures-6m-funding-21826354

- Arrakis Therapeutics raised $190M in strategic funding from Roche. The investment/partnership is focused on using Arrakis’ RNA targeting platform (rSM) to pursue 3 targets: MEK, a transcription factor, and a synthetic lethal gene for cancer — https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/arrakis-roche-team-up-rna-targeting-drugs-190m-deal

- Click Diagnostics raised $70M led by Pitango Fund, Cedars-Sinai Health System and John Doerr. The company is still relatively stealth but at a high-level they are bringing transformational PCR technologies to point-of-care diagnostics — https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3806175,00.html.

- CyberMDx raised $20M led by Sham (Relyens Group). The product is focused on healthcare security for medical devices and a hospital network in general. With companies like MedCrypt and problems like the St. Judes hack, CyberMDx is pursuing a growing problem with increasing competition — https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/07/cybermdx-device-security-funding/

- Datos Health raised $7M led by Crescendo Venture Partners. The company’s product automates various pipelines in healthcare from patient engagement to tracking. It looks interesting but where are the moats? The data — that’s unlikely.

- Ferrum Health raised $9M led by Blumberg Capital. The product focuses on reducing medical error. Ferrum scans pathology images or other patient results to flag for potential errors. The key metrics on minimizing false positive for potential errors and help clinicians avoid deploying resources to an error that really isn’t there.

- GPB Scientific raised $25.5M led by Vensana Capital. GPB uses its microfluidic CURATE platform for CAR-T cell therapy manufacturing. The value is in increasing sorting capacity, which is not the most important issue for CAR-T — http://gpbscientific.com/solutions/how-the-curate-system-works/

- Halo Labs raised $12M led by Research Corporation Technologies. Halo is a tools company for biologics formulation. Their HORIZON platform is pretty neat; it’s a image based method to see what binds a membrane with a much higher refractive index than a liquid or microfluidics based method — https://halolabs.com/bmi-how-it-works/

- i2O Therapeutics raised $4M co-led by Sanofi Ventures and JDRF T1D Fund. The company’s technology is working on reformulating biologics like insulin to go from injections to oral delivery. It’s a really tough problem to figure out which modifications can make insulin more stable — is it more cysteine or similar-like bonds or a nanoparticle? This can help improve quality of life for patients but a curative medicine like a cell transplant for T2D patients would be more exciting.

- Legend Biotech raised $150.5M with Hudson Bay Capital Management, Johnson & Johnson Innovation, Lilly Asia Ventures, Vivo Capital, and RA Capital Management participating. The cell therapy company has several BCMA programs for melanoma that are in the clinic. This round is to top off the cap table before Legend prepares to go public — https://endpts.com/ahead-of-us-ipo-legend-biotech-adds-150m-top-tier-investors-to-back-car-t-pipeline/

- Lionrock Recovery raised $7M from Wasserstein Family Trust and Big Spruce Holdings. The company has built out a telemedicine product suite to treat substance abuse. A big opportunity is to use telemedicine to allow addicts to recover at home instead of at a rehab.

- Mindler raised €8M with Ventech and Shibsted Growth co-leading. The company has a telemedicine product for mental health patients. I don’t know the company’s growth but digital health products have more traction in Europe than the US due to the centralized payment systems in the former — https://tech.eu/brief/mindler-series-a/

- Monarch Biosciences raised $1M led by Checkmate Capital. With IP from the Fred Hutch in Washington, Monarch has really great technology to transform the ability for cell therapies to pursue solid tumors.

- SilverCloud Health raised $16M led by MemorialCare Innovation Fund. Using early traction in Europe (UK NHS) the digital health company is commercializing a pretty broad product suite for mental health — https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/digital-behavioral-health-company-silvercloud-grabs-16m-series-b-funding

- SonderMind raised $27M with General Catalyst and F-Priming co-leading the round. The product is a marketplace to match patients with a therapist and help therapists find more patients. A lot of barriers for SonderMind to overcome with therapists and acquiring them.

- Spot & Tango raised $4.2M led by Guild Capital to build a DTC pet health product selling “human-grade” food for dogs.

- SwineTech raised $5M led by Innova Memphis. The company monitors the health of pigs with a interesting SmartGuard product that can be installed in a pig pen — https://swinetechnologies.com/product/smartguard/

- Tango Therapeutics raised $60M led by Boxer Capital. Tango has the shot to be a very large business using a CRISPR-based screening method to find new synthetic lethal genes for oncology. With an IO partnership with Gilead and several candidates far away from IND, the company has a long way to go to validate its targets and develop new medicines.

- TytoCare raised $50M co-led by Insight Venture Management, Olive Tree Ventures, and Qualcomm Ventures. The company has developed various at home devices to measure a patient’s status from temperature to heart rate to combine with a telemedicine product — https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/07/tyto-care-raises-50-million-as-it-looks-to-buy-and-build-new-services-during-covid-19-demand-surge/

- Wellpay raised $3.8M co-led by Mubadala, Advisors.fund, 8VC, and Montage Ventures to build a product to help payors and patients to have more clarity on billing. This is an important product to bring more transparency for healthcare spend but I’m not sure if patients will have any say in the matter, but this is a good first step.

- Wuhan Neurophth Biotechnology raised 130M CNY co-led by Sequoia China and Fosun Capital to develop AAV therapies for inherited retinal diseases — https://equalocean.com/healthcare/20200408-sequoia-and-fosun-cap-invest-in-first-ever-chinese-retinal-gene-therapy

Exits

Number of exits: 3 & Total exit value: Undisclosed (i.e. very low)

- Therapeutic Research Center (PE-owned) bought two New Jersey-based healthcare companies for undisclosed terms — CriticalPoint developing safety training programs and Clinical IQ providing consulting services for sterile compounding.

- ScanSTAT and DataFile merged at undisclosed terms. They are both Georgia based working on health-record management software.

I used to play football a long time ago — I had some decent success mainly because of my teammates with some of them playing in the NFL. Every practice, every game was an existential fight. I’m not that athletic so every year some 6’4 monster would show up trying to take my spot. Similarly, all of these companies are fighting for their right to exist whether they raised $1M or $100M. Building a great business requires passion and focus. A really powerful and useful framework to lead groups of people and win was developed by Bill Walsh — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd_CnRkKOqA