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Many venture capital firms, especially new ones, readily admit that 2024 was a challenging year to raise new capital.
Dimension Capital, a two-year-old investment firm, had a different experience when raising its second fund.
“Every investor from the first fund has returned very quickly,” said Zavien Dar (pictured middle), one of the company’s three founders and managing partners. Dimension also brought in a small number of new investors, but “the vast majority of limited partners who expressed interest ended up rejecting it.”
Less than two years after closing its inaugural $350 million fund, Dimension announced it has raised a $500 million oversubscribed fund, exceeding its $400 million goal.
Dimension’s appeal lies in its unique focus on investing in the nexus of life sciences and technology, a field that has gained popularity in recent years as the promise of drug discovery using AI (along with a greater push to build AI into the technology world). more clinical applications) seem closer than ever. In fact, Dar claims the company is the first venture capital firm dedicated solely to “bridging the gap” between biology and computer science.
Since its founding in 2022 by Dar, who was previously a general partner at Lux Capital; Another Lux investor, Adam Goulburn (pictured right); and Nan Li, Obvious Ventures alumnus (pictured left), Dimension has invested in about 20 companies. Nearly half of Dimension’s startups remain stealth.
As for the company’s well-known portfolio companies, they include Chai Discovery, a startup developing an open source AI platform for drug discovery. In September, Chai raised $30 million in seed funding led by Thrive Capital and OpenAI, with participation from Dimension. The company also backed Enveda Biosciences, a biotech company that uses artificial intelligence to develop drugs from natural compounds, which has generated significant interest. $130 million Series C last month.
When the company first launched, the partners said they were primarily focused on early-stage investing. But the focus has since expanded to include all stages of development, from start-up to public companies. Dimension invested in Monte Rosa, a publicly traded biotechnology company that uses artificial intelligence tools to develop drugs.
The stage-agnostic approach means Dimension can write checks as small as $1 million and as large as $30 million or more. As with its first fund, the second fund is likely to include about 20 portfolio companies.
Dimension’s current portfolio is roughly split between drug discovery companies and software and infrastructure companies that support biopharma, such as a still-hidden startup that builds robots to automate laboratory experiments.
Dimension Capital declined to reveal the names of the limited companies but said in general that the list includes endowments, hospitals, research institutions and others.
Unlike many traditional life sciences venture capital funds, Dimension will only invest in biotech startups if “25%, 30%, or even 40% of the team are computational biologists,” he said. Goulburn. “They are machine learning practitioners, AI engineers, and device roboticists who mingle and work symbiotically with chemists and biologists to do drug discovery.”
Dar said he was impressed by the founders who chose to start businesses in this sector.
“One of the amazing things about this moment is the level of entrepreneurs,” Dar said. “These highly ambitious, technical, scientifically educated individuals are all entering this arena.”
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