Adimab LLC has brought in $100 million in a secondary offering of shares to Fidelity Investments and Mithril, the hedge fund co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, to allow existing venture backers and other owners to cash out some or all of their holdings in the company. Adimab co-founder and CEO Tillman Gerngross, PhD, says the deal valued the antibody discovery company at $1.1 billion.
Adimab has pursued an unusual route to profitability and, ultimately, liquidity for the venture firms that have backed it since its founding in 2007. The company focuses solely on discovering antibodies for pharmaceutical and biotech partners, dozens of which have inked deals with the small, Lebanon, NH-based biotech. It has raised less than $50 million in venture funding from Polaris Ventures, SV Life Sciences, Orbimed, Borealis Ventures, and Google Ventures, and become profitable thanks to a steady stream of up-front, milestone, and technology transfer payments from its drug developer partners. In 2014 the total number of Adimab antibody programs in development at biopharma companies across the industry jumped from 40 to 74. Gerngross says it won’t be long until that figure climbs past 100. The biotech now has struck partnerships with more than 30 companies, large (Pfizer Inc., Roche, Novartis AG, and others) and small (Jounce Therapeutics Inc., Acceleron Pharma Inc., and Merrimack Pharmaceuticals Inc., for example)
