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Ready To Make Bigger Biotech Investments, Vida Raises $600m For Second Fund

 
• By Mandy Jackson

Scrip spoke with Fred Cohen, who co-founded Vida Ventures with former Kite Pharma CEO Arie Belldegrun, about the venture capital firm's investment focus after raising its second fund in two years.

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Vida's new fund will allow it to invest about $40m per company. • Source: Shutterstock

Vida Ventures raised two times as much money for its second venture capital fund than it did for its first fund less than two years ago, but it will invest in the same number of companies with its new $600m pool of cash, according to senior managing partner Fred Cohen. The larger fund will allow Vida to make bigger investments in each opportunity and make sure that its companies can reach their next value inflection point even if the economy shifts into a negative cycle.

Cohen co-founded Vida Ventures in 2017 with Arie Belldegrun, who was the CEO of Kite Pharma Inc. when the chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy developer was sold that year to Gilead Sciences Inc. for $11.9bn. (Also see "What's Gilead Getting From Kite For Nearly $12bn?" - Scrip, 29 August, 2017

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