Nearly a decade ago, Ricardo Perdigão Henriques’ colleagues balked at the idea of him leaving Boston to return home to Portugal to build a biotech ecosystem as a VC.
“They said, ‘You’re crazy, Ricardo. Just stay in Boston, find a job and forget Portugal,'” Henriques said in an interview with Endpoints News.
He and his wife, a VC in clean tech, ultimately returned to Portugal, where he wound up working at VC firm Portugal Ventures. After a few years, he moved to Lisbon-based Bionova Capital, the corporate VC arm of biomanufacturing company Hovione.
“It’s been really going against the tide because nobody believed you could do that,” Henriques said.
Six months after Bionova portfolio company CellmAbs secured a potentially €1 billion exit to BioNTech, Henriques is back with a new biotech-focused VC firm called Biovance Capital Partners.
Henriques took the wraps off the Lisbon firm’s €51 million (about $55 million) initial close on Tuesday morning, with the goal of expanding that to a €60 million final close.
Biovance expects to back about a dozen biotech startups over the next five years, Henriques said, with plans to dole out checks of up to €6 million for seed and Series A rounds that give Portuguese and southern European entrepreneurs the chance to get to the stage that larger European and US funds can come in and carry them to meaningful clinical milestones.
“The science is at the same caliber as the United States. A lot of our scientists train in the United States. I personally have trained at Harvard Medical School, so we get the same type of training. The creativity is at the same level,” Henriques said.
Earlier-stage funding has started to pick up recently, but there’s still a gap in late-stage financing for biotech startups in the region, the Biovance managing partner said.
“Our motivation is really to support science here. The size of the fund is appropriate for the kind of opportunities we see here,” Henriques said. “A megafund in Portugal would also not be easy then to triple or quadruple, because it would be too much capital for this region of southern Europe.”
Biovance is one of multiple biomedical VC groups trying to build momentum in less-funded parts of Europe — like Portugal, Austria, Italy and Ireland — than its counterparts in the UK, France, Netherlands, Germany and elsewhere.
Investors in Biovance’s initial fund include the European Investment Fund, Banco Português de Fomento, Portugal Tech and InvestEU programs, Caixa Capital, Ageas Pensions, EDP Pension Fund and undisclosed private investors from the US and Europe.