Søren Møller joined Denmark-based pharmaceutical firm Novo in 2011 as managing investment director of its early-stage corporate venture capital (CVC) arm Novo Seeds.
Novo is the fully-owned shareholding subsidiary of the Novo Nordisk Foundation, a foundation founded in 1923 with corporate interests. Apart from Novo Seeds, Novo also has a venture capital to development stage fund dubbed Novo Ventures.
Novo Seeds focuses on life sciences technology developers: the unit incubates and backs entrepreneurs through pre-seed grants or equity finance. Recent deals involving Novo Seeds include investments in Netherlands-based NorthSea Therapeutics and in Chromologics, a Danish developer of natural food colourants. At present, the unit has a total of 32 portfolio companies.
Møller said: “The most promising early-stage biotech companies are developed and financed through our equity investments. We place great emphasis on working closely with other venture funds to syndicate our startups.
“In addition to providing capital, we use our commercial expertise to provide projects and companies with the managerial and strategic support to steer them through the critical startup phase.”
Before joining Novo Seeds, Møller was a global manager of bioinformatics at biotechnology producer Novozymes. Prior to that, he was vice-president of research and development at RNA research firm Exiqon, which went public and was eventually acquired by medical diagnostics technology provider Qiagen in 2016.
Møller earned a master of science degree and his PhD in molecular biology from the Technical University of Denmark. He also has academic training as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, having taken a course on marketing innovative technologies at Harvard Business School.
