Netherlands-based anticoagulation therapy developer VarmX closed a €32m ($36.2m) series B round yesterday that included Lundbeckfonden Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of pharmaceutical firm Lundbeck.
Venture capital firms Ysios Capital and Inkef Capital co-led the round, which also featured fellow VC firm BioGeneration Ventures (BGV) as well as life sciences investment firm LSP and InnovationQuarter, West Holland’s regional development agency.
VarmX is developing a treatment for patients who suffer spontaneous bleeding when being treated with oral factor Xa inhibitors as an anticoagulation therapy or preventative for conditions such as deep vein thrombosis or strokes caused by atrial fibrillation.
The series B funds will go to advancing VarmX’s lead compound, VMX-C001, into a first-in-human study and toward registrational studies for severe bleeding and emergency surgery indications. It also plans to expand its production capabilities.
The company was spun out of Leiden University Medical Center in 2016 and its technology is based on research by Pieter Reitsma, a professor emeritus at the university who is also VarmX’s founder and chief scientific officer.
Casper Breum, a senior partner at Lundbeckfonden Ventures, is joining VarmX’s board of directors along with Ysios Capital’s Guillem Laporta, Roel Bulthuis from Inkef Capital and John de Koning of LSP.
BGV and InnovationQuarter provided an undisclosed amount of seed funding for VarmX in 2017 before co-leading an $8.8m series A round in mid-2018. Leiden University and Leiden-backed investment fund Uniiq had supplied convertible debt financing for the company in 2016.
