Arlington’s Sands Capital has raised a whopping $560 million for its second life sciences fund.
The fund, Sands Capital Life Sciences Pulse Fund II LP, follows an earlier fund from 2018 focused on life sciences. Together the Pulse Strategy funds have $950 million in assets under management, Sands said.
The Pulse II fund will make investments in private therapeutics, diagnostics and life sciences tools, with a mission to “help transform how diseases are defined, diagnosed and treated,” the firm said.
"We believe the life sciences sector is in the early stages of a scientific and technological revolution that is generating, and will generate for decades to come, tremendous value for patients and society," Stephen Zachary, managing partner of Sands Capital, said in a statement.
Pulse Strategy has invested in 20 businesses since 2018, per the investment firm.
Sands Capital Ventures invests in IT, health care, financial services and consumer companies around the world. Its portfolio companies include some big names, including food delivery unicorn DoorDash Inc., workplace productivity tool Slack Technologies LLC and workflow software UiPath.
The latest fund brings Sands Capital Ventures' total raise to $1.5 billion, according to data from PitchBook. The company closed its $351 million Sands Global Innovation Fund I in 2019, and previously launched a $145 million life sciences fund in 2019, a $173 million global venture fund in 2018, a $159 million global venture fund in 2016 and a $113 million global private growth fund in 2014, per PitchBook.
The company is also raising another fund at the moment, Sands Capital Global Innovation Fund II-KLV, which it notified the Securities and Exchange Commission about in June. We’ve reached out for more information on the status of that fund and will update this post if we hear back.
This is a younger affiliate of the nearly three-decade-old Sands Capital Management, a long-term investor in publicly traded companies founded in 1992 and led by CEO Frank Sands. Sands Capital said it managed more than $80 billion in public and private investments, including $9 billion in life sciences and health care companies, as of June 30.
