Venture capital giant Flagship Pioneering plans to invest a total of $3.6 billion in new capital over the next three to five years to help create and develop around 25 startups in the areas of life sciences, human health, sustainability and artificial intelligence.
This new effort will see Flagship’s core portfolio focused on human health and sustainability, further expanding its AI portfolio that has grown over the past six years since the company entered the space with the founding of Generate:Biomedicines, a developer of therapeutics based on de novo protein generation. Flagship participated with a number of other investors in Generate:Biomedicines’ $273 million Series C funding that closed last year, bringing the company’s total equity funding since 2020 to nearly $700 million.
“From there, we have deployed AI more broadly, including AI for cell-based drug discovery, AI-based drug development, and using DNA-based AI to design novel DNA and novel lipid nanoparticles,” a Flagship spokesperson said. general“Flagship, through our company and our internal teams, aims to lead an AI revolution in drug discovery and development – one that goes from craftsmanship and stochastic to one that is engineered and programmable.”
Flagship added that the new human health-focused platform company it plans to build will “include drug discovery and development, diagnostics, computational tools and more.”
Flagship has raised $2.6 billion for its eighth fund, Fund VIII, as well as side funds totaling $1 billion that include sector-specific strategic partnerships. The $3.6 billion brings the total capital Flagship has raised for its funds since 2021 to $6.4 billion.
Flagship cautioned that not all of the $1 billion fund or side funds will be sector-specific strategic alliances, and even those new alliances may differ from those already announced.
One example of a sector-specific strategic partnership that Flagship has maintained in recent years is its co-launch with diabetes and obesity drug giant Novo Nordisk. In this partnership, which began in 2022, Novo Nordisk will fund research programs as they are initiated and has the option to exclusively license each program.
Novo Nordisk and Flagship have achieved their initial goal of launching three to five research programs within the first three years of the collaboration, and Novo Nordisk has ongoing collaborations with the three Flagship Pioneer companies.
Two were launched in January, involving AI-based drug development company Serality and Omega Therapeutics, a developer of programmable epigenomic messenger RNA (mRNA) therapies, while the third collaboration was launched in May with Metaphor Biotechnologies, a venture launched by Novo Nordisk and Flagship, to develop up to two advanced obesity management treatments.
Novo Nordisk is one of three partners — the others are Pfizer and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation — with which Flagship Pioneering’s in-house drug development arm, Pioneering Medicines, will develop treatments. Pioneering Medicines has grown to more than 100 employees, has a pipeline of 10 treatments in development, and plans to expand its partnerships, Flagship said.
As a result of its latest funding, Flagship now has total capital of $10.9 billion and assets under management of $14 billion.
Flagship said it and its co-investors have invested a total of $5.8 billion in equity capital into its current ecosystem of companies since closing its last fund in 2021.
“Our unique approach to making groundbreaking scientific discoveries, coupled with our track record of founding, incubating and scaling companies, has led to the creation and growth of over 100 biotechnology companies in just over two decades,” Nourbar Afeyan, PhD, founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, said in a statement. “We believe that Flagship’s most creative and impactful days are ahead of us.”
