When Christopher Trummer tried raising money for his molecular glue degrader startup, he struggled to find VC support in his native Austria. The company, Celeris Therapeutics, had to leap to the US to finally reel in the dollars it needed to find its footing.
Trummer recently left Celeris, now named Adhesion Therapeutics, to create a venture capital firm that he and partner Florian Schuster hope will help prevent similar scenarios for other biotech entrepreneurs in Austria and surrounding regions in Eastern Europe.
They’re raising €40 million (about $43 million) for Venga Ventures, the pair of general partners exclusively told Endpoints News.
“We have done life sciences now for centuries. We’re in fact very, very good at that,” Trummer said about Austria’s biomedical research community. But, he added, the local landscape could use a leg up. “Where we lack most,” he said, “is in terms of the translational work.”
He and Schuster, a co-founder or early executive at startups like Tessa Therapeutics and bit.bio, have set up Venga with the mission of building up an Austrian biotech scene and pumping capital into a region that otherwise usually sees startups depart early on to gain support in investor-ripe areas like Boston, San Francisco or elsewhere in Europe.
Venga, which has entrepreneurs as LPs but still seeks an anchor investor, will lead or co-lead seed-plus and Series A rounds, doling out checks in the range of €1 million to €4 million. The firm plans to be modality- and therapeutic area-agnostic at the start. It wants to set a foundation before getting niche.
“There has been no dedicated biotech seed-plus and Series A fund in that region so far,” Schuster said of Austria. “That’s the first gap that we want to fill. Then, as the ecosystem matures, we will naturally go into deeper areas of specialization with future funds most likely.”
He called it an “ecosystem that’s ready to break out.” A few startups in Austria have been bought in recent years, including vaccine developer Themis, AI-driven precision medicine shop Allcyte, life sciences tools company Single Use Support and antibacterial developer PhagoMed Biopharma.
Venga looks to add to the overall pool of capital that life sciences investors elsewhere in Europe have been building up. New money has been disclosed this year from Germany-based Earlybird Health, Barcelona’s Invivo, Dublin-headquartered Seroba and Milan-based XGEN Venture.
Venga is named after the phrase “¡Venga! ¡Venga! ¡Venga!,” which climbers will sometimes shout to encourage their fellow boulder ascenders. It’s “very exemplary for what we want to be to the Austrian biotech ecosystem,” Trummer said. “We want to push it.”
The firm has enlisted fellow Austrians and biotech veterans as its scientific advisors, including Eidos Therapeutics (now part of BridgeBio) co-founder Isabella Graef, bit.bio CEO Mark Kotter, Kronos Bio CEO Norbert Bischofberger and Triana Biomedicines CEO Patrick Trojer. None of their biotechs are based in Austria.