France-based venture capital firm Seventure Partners has reached the first close of a €200m ($225m) healthcare-focused fund with commitments from corporate limited partners including cheese producer Bel and food provider Danone.
Pharmaceutical firm Novartis, yeast manufacturer Lesaffre, medical device producer Wright Medical and Unigrains, the investment arm of agricultural products supplier Unicéréales, have also backed the fund.
Health for Life Capital II has also signed up an as-yet unnamed US-based food ingredient provider, undisclosed financial services firms and assorted individual investors. The size of the first close has not been revealed.
The fund will invest globally, focusing on technologies centred on the human microbiome, but will also conduct opportunistic investments in areas such as digital therapeutics, digital health, digital nutritional advice, personalised diets, precision medicine and food technologies.
The vehicle had already invested in biopharmaceutical company Axial Biotherapeutics’s $25m series B round last week and in a $90m series C for Galecto Biotech, a developer of cancer and fibrosis treatments, in October 2018.
The fund builds on Seventure’s Health for Life Capital fund, which has backed 20 companies since launched in 2014. It achieved its first exit in 2017 when amino acid-based products supplier Ajinomoto North America acquired therapeutic nutrition producer Cambrooke Therapeutics.
Health for Life Capital closed at $175m, securing commitments from LPs including Novartis, Danone, Lesaffre, Bel and bioethanol producer Tereos as well as prosthesis maker Tornier, which has since merged with Wright Medical.
