France-based venture capital firm Sofinnova Partners closed its MD Start III fund at €48m ($53.5m) yesterday having raised cash from investors including medical device makers Medtronic and LivaNova.
Pharmaceutical company Baxter Healthcare is also among the fund’s limited partners, as are public investment bank BPIfrance’s French Tech Acceleration fund and the multilateral European Investment Fund.
Sofinnova created MD Start in 2009 in tandem with entrepreneurs Tim Lenihan and Gérard Hascoët to seed and accelerate early-stage medical device startups, and its early backers included Medtronic.
MD Start sources medical systems when they are at the stage when they are ready to provide the basis for startup companies, and supplies funding in addition to the resources required to take them to the clinical testing stage. It is now being managed by Anne Osdoit, a partner at Sofinnova Ventures.
Osdoit said: “We are thrilled to be announcing this new vintage of MD Start now under the Sofinnova Partners’ umbrella, with an ambitious mission of bringing new therapeutic devices to patients in need, leveraging the expertise of our founding contributors and providing financial, managerial, operational and strategic resources to our newly formed companies.”
MD Start’s first iteration was backed by Medtronic and Sofinnova Partners as well as fellow medical device producer Sorin Group, which committed in 2011, medical device services provider Contract Medical International and healthcare investment firm Versant Ventures.
