Curie.Bio, a Cambridge, MA-based biotech accelerator that aims to “free the founders,” has raised a $380 million fund mainly to support nascent startups that graduate from its program.
The fund, disclosed Wednesday morning, brings the firm’s total capital haul to nearly $1 billion. A “majority” of the latest raise will go toward Series A rounds in drug developers that it has helped shepherd toward the clinic.
Alexis Borisy, Zach Weinberg and Christoph Lengauer unveiled a $520 million round in February 2023 from GV, Casdin, ARCH Venture Partners, a16z bio+health and Nextech. The firm is devoting about $270 million of that to seed investing and the remainder to setting up an R&D services arm to help entrepreneurs bring their experimental plans to fruition and get to the clinic relatively quickly.
Its first graduate, Forward Therapeutics, raised a $50 million Series A last year at a five-fold valuation step-up, but Curie didn’t participate in the round. The oral small molecule biotech emerged with three drug candidates in 18 months.
Curie typically invests about $5 million to $7 million in a seed round, and its drug discovery accelerator takes about a 7% stake in exchange for its services, the fund has said. It has a 50-person team supporting the portfolio companies, Curie said.
At the time of Forward’s launch, Lengauer said Curie had been approached by about 1,000 founders thus far. Its 20-startup portfolio includes therapeutics developers like Astoria Biologica, Decrypt Biomedicine and Differentiated Therapeutics. Each drug it invests in “must have blockbuster potential,” meaning at least $1 billion in peak sales, Curie said Wednesday.
“The founders could do this with only $8 million and still own what we call a David Liu-size of shares of their company,” Lengauer told Endpoints News last December, referring to the famed Harvard researcher who’s co-founded gene editing biotechs like Prime Medicine and Beam Therapeutics. “David can do this because he is who he is. Normal founders can’t. Normal founders own little in their company.”