Novo Holdings, the parent company of Europe’s largest healthtech company Novo Nordisk, and the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO) have pledged a combined €48m to Swedish life science VC HealthCap’s ninth fund.
HealthCap, which has offices in Stockholm and Lausanne, Switzerland, will establish a local presence in Copenhagen at the BioInnovation Institute (BII) to increase its focus on Nordic investment opportunities.
HealthCap focuses on precision medicine and therapies targeting areas of high unmet medical need and has invested in over 130 companies over the years. The new fund has, in addition to its core focus, committed to supporting early-stage companies emerging from academic and corporate research environments, to help them progress towards further financing.
“We have a vibrant and healthy ecosystem in the Nordics, but the lack of life science IPOs, both in the Nordics but also globally, is making it challenging for early stage startups to raise funding,” says Daniel Rasmussen, Principal for seed investments at Novo Holdings.
“We need to make sure there’s enough early-stage capital available for startups to support their growth.”
While Novo Nordisk may have recently lost its spot as Europe’s biggest company by market cap to software giant SAP, it is still valued at a massive $260bn. Its holding company, Novo Holdings, reaps one-quarter of the dividends paid by Novo Nordisk and a chunk of that cash — $1–2bn a year — is put aside for investing in and building healthtech startups.
Novo Holdings has an annual budget of around $200m to invest in early-stage startups. In addition to that, it is an important limited partner (LP) for VCs such as HealthCap.
Rasmussen cannot say how many funds the seed investment department at Novo Holdings have invested in, but says it is a “low double-digit” number and that the investment, together with EIFO, is “a fairly large contribution”.
According to Sifted sources, the HealthCap fund is at around €200m and it’s the third fund of HealthCap’s funds that Novo Holdings invests in.
HealthCap’s managing director, Mårten Steen, declined to comment on the size of the fund or whether it is closed or not, citing regulatory reasons, but says the funding of EIFO and Novo Holdings will lead to further investments in Danish startups.
“Partly thanks to Novo Holdings, the Nordics is one of the strongest hubs in Europe, and Denmark has a vibrant and active life science ecosystem. We already have investments in Denmark in the portfolio, and we expect to add more of them in the near future,” Steen says.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/novo-holdings-and-eifo-invest-e48m-in-swedish-healthcaps-latest-fund/
