A biotech-focused venture studio with ties to the University of California in San Francisco has raised around $30 million to fuel its pursuit of accelerating new drug discovery.
Foundery Innovations announced on Tuesday that it had raised nearly $30 million in cash and assets as it works towards targeting a total of $160 million for its initial fund — $20 million more than the team told the San Francisco Business Times earlier this year.
Its investors include "an established family office, a public research university endowment, and growth and impact-oriented high-net worth individuals," the company said in a statement.
Fortress Investment Group principal Pete Briger is also backing Foundery, the Business Times previously reported.
The company operates as a so-called venture studio, which are typically incubators for early-stage ideas that are validated in-house before they're spun out as businesses.
Foundery was started in 2021 by a team of scientists, including UCSF researcher Matthew Krummel, who chairs the UCSF Baker ImmunoX Initiative.
Krummel co-founded Foundery with Michel Streuli and Venkataraman Sriram.
Their goal is to accelerate immunotherapy research for new drug discovery, an often costly and time consuming process, by licensing intellectual property from university researchers.
"It's just like a movie studio — the equipment and expertise is recycled, it's not kept with the movie," Krummel told the Business Times earlier this year. "You get a dud or a winner, but you can bunch them. Basically, you have a pre-built team, where you bring new projects in, not new people."
Foundery signed a five-year partnership with UCSF earlier this year, and the university will receive a stake in any new companies that are spun out of Foundery.
In April, the company also announced a partnership with the University of Arizona.
Foundery currently has a single research and development lab that's around 14,000-square-feet based in San Francisco.
It also has nine programs in development at the moment that are spread across both of university partners, though all of its research will take place in its San Francisco lab, Foundery told me. Eventually, Foundery said its goal is to review more than 100 drug targets under the first fund.
"We have modeled that this will lead to multiple drug development candidates (DCs) that will form the basis of our portfolio companies, which will typically be monetized by out-licensing to biopharma prior to capital-intensive clinical development," a Foundery spokesperson told me via email. "Our business model and portfolio construction are modular; if we raise less, we will create fewer DCs/portfolio companies."
