An Austin venture capital firm with a long history of investing in Texas health care and life sciences startups has secured a new $250 million fund that will help fuel 20-plus investments.
Santé Ventures, which was founded in 2006 and has made 33 investment since, makes its first investments, typically as a lead or co-leader, in startups anywhere between a Series Seed and a Series B round.
The firm, led by former leaders from Austin Ventures, Ascension Health Ventures and Ascension Health, already has four Austin startups in its life sciences portfolio. Those include: BioStable Science & Engineering, which works on tech to treat heart valve disease; Lumos Pharma, which develops drugs to treat a rare metabolic disease; Molecular Templates, which has a protein platform that helps in development of new cancer-fighting drugs; and Terapio, which is developing therapies based on the RLIP76 transport protein.
But Santé Ventures' portfolio also includes investments in companies across the country from health tech hubs like Minneapolis and Houston, to Dallas, Boston and the West Coast.
“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," Kevin Lalande, co-founder and managing director at Santé Ventures, said in a news release. "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.”
It said the new fund was backed by 30-plus investors, including new investor Pennsylvania Public School Employees' Retirement System. The firm also overshot its targeted $200 million fundraise for its third fund by 25 percent.
The new $250 million fund is nearly double the size its second fund, a $130 million effort that closed in 2011.
The firm, which is based in Austin and has offices in Houston, plans to make 20-25 investments. And it has already made three, accounting for about about 6.5 percent of the fund. Those include deals with Cryosa, a sleep apnea treatment, DyaMX, a treatment for Type II diabetes and Geneos Therapeutics, a cancer therapy.
