Sonic Incytes Medical Corp. collected $7.3 million in a series A fundraising round to bring its liver-focused point-of-care ultrasound solution to commercialization. Nimbus Synergies led the round with participation from Nicola Wealth, Mint Venture Partners, Consortium Medteq, Wavemaker Three-Sixty Health, Gaingels, INP Capital and several angel investors. The round was oversubscribed by 150%. The hand-held Velacur system noninvasively quantifies liver volume, stiffness and attenuation, critical factors in diagnosing and monitoring liver disease in a process that takes about five minutes and can be performed in a physician’s office. The system received FDA clearance late last year.
Protein profiling startup Nomic Bio has secured $17 million in an oversubscribed series A financing led by Lux Capital. The funds will be used to expand the company’s servicing and manufacturing labs in Montreal and Boston, to broaden access to its proteomic platform by scaling profiling capacity to 100,000 samples per quarter starting in the second quarter of 2022 and by scaling its protein-detection method, called nELISA, to 500 on-boarded proteins.
Med-tech financings in 2021 have reached 673 transactions valued at $48.04 billion. This compares with 718 transactions valued at $59.7 billion in 2020, indicating a drop this year of about 6% in terms of volume and nearly 20% in terms of value. Nevertheless, 2021 is the second-best year of the last five.
It’s been more than six years since the FDA’s first approval of an oncolytic virus – Amgen Inc.’s melanoma drug Imlygic (talimogene laherparepvec) – and it’s easy to argue that progress in the field has been overshadowed by success with other immunotherapy types such as checkpoint inhibitors. Though the FDA hasn’t approved any more oncolytic viruses since then, Phoenix-based Oncomyx Therapeutics Inc. is one of several companies trying to change that.
Newpath Partners closed its second fund with a $350 million raise, to continue its model of backing scientist-entrepreneurs during the earliest stages of company formation. The Boston-based firm works closely with a tight circle of influential scientific leaders to establish firms with high levels of scientific originality – and high ambitions to match.
LONDON – Merck KGaA has increased the size of its corporate venture fund M Ventures to €600 million (US$676.4 million), to be invested over the next five years. This is the third increase in the financial commitment to the evergreen fund following its formation as Merck Serono Ventures in 2009, with €40 million. Since then, it has backed more than 80 companies. The larger fund will allow M Ventures to further grow the number and the size of its investments but, said Hakan Goker, managing director of M Ventures, “We will not change the strategy per se.”
Abogen Biosciences Co. Ltd. has raised $300 million in a series C+ round to support the development of its mRNA products, specifically to support the development of its COVID-19 mRNA vaccine and expand to the global market.
Suki AI Inc. recorded $55 million in a series C fundraising round to support further development of its artificial intelligence (AI)-driven voice technology and digital clinical assistant for health care providers. The round was led by March Capital with participation by Philips Ventures. All previous investors in the company also returned, including Gaingels Group, Pankaj Patel (former chief development officer of Cisco), Andrew Deutsch (CEO of RIMA Radiology), and Russell Farscht (former managing director of The Carlyle Group).
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