Date: 2016-06-06
Type of information: Financing round
Company: Vedanta Biosciences (USA - MA)
Investors: Health For Life Capital (Seventure) (France) Invesco Asset Management (UK) PureTech (USA - MA) Rock Springs Capital (USA - MD)
Amount: $50 million
Funding type: financing round
Planned used: Proceeds from the financing will be used to advance multiple clinical studies in infectious and autoimmune diseases and to scale Vedanta's technology platform. The company has built a proprietary platform for the discovery, development, and manufacturing of drugs based on live commensal microbes. Using its platform, Vedanta has isolated a vast collection of human-associated bacterial strains, characterised how the immune system recognises and responds to these microbes, and generated a pipeline of drug candidates consisting of defined bacterial consortia in development for infectious disease, immune tolerance, inflammation, and immuno-oncology. Vedanta has landmark licensing agreement with J&J with up-front and milestone payments of up to $339 million. The company recently expanded into a new headquarters and research and development facility in Cambridge, MA, including a state-of-the-art Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) facility for fully integrated discovery and production of live bacterial drugs.
Others: * On June 6, 2016, Vedanta Biosciences announced that it has raised $50 million in new equity investments. New investors Rock Springs Capital, Invesco Asset Management and Health For Life Capital (Seventure) were joined by PureTech in the financing. Of the approximately $50 million raised in this financing, Invesco will contribute approximately $11 million for the purchase of an aggregate of 485,651 preferred shares. Invesco is a substantial shareholder of PureTech pursuant to the Listing Rules, and thus this transaction is a smaller related party transaction falling within the scope of Listing Rule 11.1.10R. As a result of PureTech’s equity contribution of approximately $30 million, PureTech’s percentage ownership of Vedanta will be 75.4% on a diluted basis. Additionally, PureTech’s ownership adjusted value in Vedanta will increase by approximately $37 million from the previously reported balance2. All contributions will be made in two equal tranches. Health For Life Capital (Seventure) will contribute approximately $8 million Vedanta Biosciences was founded by PureTech Health and a group of leading experts in immunology and microbiology. Vedanta’s scientific co-founders have pioneered the fields of innate immunity, Th17 and regulatory T cell biology, and include Dr. Ruslan Medzhitov (Professor of Immunobiology at Yale), Dr. Alexander Rudensky (tri-institutional Professor at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute, the Rockefeller University and Cornell University), Dr. Dan Littman (Professor of Molecular Immunology at NYU), Dr. Brett Finlay (Professor at the University of British Columbia) and Dr. Kenya Honda (Professor, School of Medicine, Keio University). Vedanta’s Board of Directors includes Board Chairman Christopher Viehbacher, Managing Partner at Gurnet Point Capital and former CEO and Member of the Board of Directors of Sanofi; Dr. Bennett Shapiro, former Executive Vice President of Merck; Dr. John LaMattina, former President of research and development at Pfizer and David Steinberg, Co-Founder of Vedanta and Executive Vice President at PureTech.
Therapeutic area: Autoimmune diseases - Infectious diseases
