Flagship Pioneering, the 25-year-old life sciences incubator and investor, has reeled in $3.6 billion to build another 25 or so companies, it said Wednesday morning.
The new capital pool consists of $2.6 billion for its eighth fund and $1 billion in “side funds,” which contain “sector-specific strategic partnerships,” Flagship said. It will create new biotechs and startups across sustainability and AI. Endpoints News reported last week that the firm had increased the scope of its fundraising.
The new haul is slightly larger than the seventh fund, which came in at nearly $3.4 billion in June 2021. All told, Flagship now has $14 billion in assets under management.
The seventh fund was raised in two tranches of about $1.1 billion and $2.2 billion, but the new haul announced Wednesday is “really the major close for this go-around,” Flagship CEO Noubar Afeyan said in an interview. Flagship has “the capacity for specific situations with potentially new investors who might come in a little bit later.”
“Limited partners who are, by definition, long-term investors — these are 10-year funds — they want to make sure that the sector itself has the underpinnings to deliver long-term value,” Afeyan said. “From that point of view, there’s a high degree of positivity. There’s no way that this kind of capital would flow, in our instance anyway, in one single entity.”
Flagship has already created more than 100 companies, with pandemic vaccine maker Moderna standing out as its prime example. The Cambridge, MA-based group has recently expanded to the UK and Singapore.
“Most people looking at what other such expansions looked like expect that we’re there to find new companies or new investments, and that’s not what we’re there to do,” Afeyan said. “We’re there to connect our ecosystem of some 48 companies in Cambridge [and] Boston to vibrant, growing ecosystems in the UK and APAC, so Japan and Korea through Singapore.”
The Flagship founder described the geographic expansions as an experiment being done in a “highly exploratory way” to connect its companies to manufacturing and financial partners, boost clinical trials, expand data collaborations and find new talent.
Flagship is also growing its three-year-old Pioneering Medicines initiative, a more than 100-person unit steering a pipeline of 10 therapeutics.
A series of promotions and new hires were also announced Wednesday. The company elevated Lovisa Afzelius, who has led multiple early-stage Flagship companies, to general partner. Paul Biondi, president of Pioneering Medicines, is also taking on a general partner post. Former EQRx general counsel Dina Ciarimboli was named executive partner, as was Harvard business professor Gary Pisano. Moderna’s former chief digital officer, Marcello Damiani, is now senior partner at Flagship.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to include details from an interview with Flagship founder Noubar Afeyan.