The top 100 venture investors in biopharma today. Who’s staying at the deals table?

Remember how good 2020 was for biotech venture numbers? Now hold that thought.

Bioregnum Opinion Column by John Carroll

Diving into the numbers for life science venture investors last year, DealForma’s Chris Dokomajilar tracked a dramatic downturn in 2022, setting the stage for a new normal that puts healthcare back at levels registered in 2019 and 2020.

But biopharma was singled out for some rough handling once you break them out of the pack. In his annual look at the top 100 investors in biotech, Dokomajilar found that close to $20 billion of the $51 billion in life sciences investments tracked last year were directed at platforms and therapeutics.

That’s a big slide from the $36 billion from the year before but a fit for the 2019/2020 time frame, when biotech financing jumped from $15 to $26 billion.

There’s a difference, though, between the pre-pandemic VC trend and now, as Dokomajilar not surprisingly tracks more follow-on investing and round extensions — which makes sense as the IPO window largely shuttered tight, leaving startups looking for more backing over a longer stretch.

And while early-stage startups are still very much in the mix, the fizzle on the 2021 sizzle left money for 731 biopharma seed and series rounds in 2021, compared to 491 last year.

Everything took a hit in biopharma last year, as you can see from this chart singling out biotech, with early stage and preclinical work holding up best to 2019/2020 levels, when the industry was enjoying steadily higher investment rates from a set of investors who had survived the 2009 seize up.

Of all the life science sectors, diagnostics and research tools, along with the medtech/devices sector, held up relatively well, but therapeutics plunged after a go-go 2021, when just about everything was getting funded and just about everyone saw easy pickings on Nasdaq.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that an investor like Google’s GV would emerge as one of the most prolific investors in the industry. Not tied to any particular year’s performance, GV is one of the most durable deep-pocket investors looking at drug development.

Dokomajilar’s group tracks whatever they scrape from public sources, augmenting the numbers with information directly from the VCs. While specific dollar amounts invested in each round are not available, he takes the totals and divvies them up by the number.

The list is ranked by the total number of deals, putting longtime investor F-Prime — ranked number 11 in 2022 — on the top this year, though the average on dollars invested likely dropped down more into the mainstream. RA Capital and OrbiMed, historically major players, stayed in the top 3 on deals.

But there were clearly fewer players overall in the multibillion-dollar game of biotech investing, as the bust on Nasdaq hit a whole younger generation for the first time.

Notes Dokomajilar: “2,563 investment firms participated in 1,328 life sciences venture rounds completed in 2022. In 2021, this was 2,925 investors in 1,746 rounds.”

More seasoned players can point to earlier shocks in the system that all led to new historic highs. And that’s what many are counting on now.

We’ve had a chance to exchange numbers directly with key players. If you see something you’d like to flag, contact me directly and we’ll take a look.

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