Courtesy Elisabeth Fall/Fall Foto
Foresite Capital CEO Jim Tananbaum
- Foresite Capital, a healthcare and life sciences venture firm, just raised a $668 million fund, bringing its total under management to $2 billion.
- The firm's investment thesis is to find companies at any stage with a technological innovation that addresses a particular need within healthcare, and stick with it until it's profitable.
- The team, which includes former Verily and Grail executive Vik Bajaj, is full of scientists-turned investors "We're a proudly geeky crew," Foresite CEO Jim Tananbaum said.
Foresite Capital, a life sciences and healthcare venture firm that now has $2 billion under management, is in it for the long haul.
The San Francisco-based firm's thesis, which extends into its newest $668 million fund, is to find technological innovations that fit a particular need within healthcare - whether that be in genomics, drug development, or healthcare delivery.
"The investment thesis is around they're providing a market solution and staying with them until they're fully provided that market solution," Foresite Capital CEO Jim Tananbaum told Business Insider. "So profitable is the goal."
That could mean waiting around even years after a drug is approved. For example, Foresite invested in a company developing an antibiotic that Tananbaum isn't expecting to reach peak sales until eight years later. The majority of venture firms in the healthcare space, meanwhile, wait five to seven years to exit an investment.
"We're set up to hold things for very long periods of time in the fund life period of time," Tananbaum said. "So hopefully we'll have some things on our hands that we'll be psyched to do that with."
Tananbaum co-founded two biotech companies before starting Foresite in 2011. Since then, the firm has grown into a 40-person team with former drug development executives, doctors, and scientists.
"We're a proudly geeky crew," Tananbaum said.
Courtesy Elisabeth Fall/Fall Foto
Foresite Capital managing director Vik Bajaj
In 2017, the firm recruited Vik Bajaj, a co-founder of Alphabet's life sciences arm Verily and the former chief scientific officer of Grail, a company developing a blood test to detect cancer in its earliest stages.
Bajaj sees the world of data
It could also influence how we develop drugs to treat particular diseases and how we go about testing those drugs to make sure the right people benefit from them, Bajaj said.
"We see all those opportunities, but it is by no means clear which ones will be successful and not," Bajaj said. "There is an important role for investors to nucleate and catalyze that transformation."
Joining Foresite, with its "geeky" approach, made it simple to make the jump from scientist to investor.
"I have a very rigorous approach to understanding those problems which is shared by all my colleagues at Foresite," Bajaj said. "I really feel at home being a recent practicing scientist and coming here as an investor."