NEW YORK– Catalio Capital Management, LP (“Catalio”), a leading multi-strategy life sciences investment firm, today announced the successful close of its third venture fund, Catalio Nexus Fund III (“Fund III” or the “Fund”), with more than $381 million in total capital commitments, exceeding its original $300 million target. The Fund received significant backing from current Catalio investors and a number of new, global institutional investors, foundations and endowments.
Launched in 2020 and led by Co-Founders George Petrocheilos and Dr. Jacob Vogelstein, Catalio manages more than $1 billion in assets across its private equity, private credit, and public equities strategies. Fund III is Catalio’s largest closed-end fund to date. Previously, Catalio raised $15 million for Nexus Fund I and $100 million for Nexus Fund II.
Consistent with the successful approach of its predecessor vehicles, Fund III will invest in breakthrough biomedical technology companies at all stages of growth, from inception to IPO. Many of the companies in which the Fund invests are founded by Catalio Venture Partners, a group of 36 world-renowned serial scientist-entrepreneurs at top-tier academic institutions in the U.S. and Europe, each with a successful track record of starting up and spinning out businesses. The Fund’s investment strategy will leverage this unique venture partnership structure, which provides the firm with proprietary investment opportunities and deep technical insights on prospective investments.
Catalio’s Head of Marketing, Brandon Matz, said: “Our disciplined, solutions-based investment approach has helped us build a highly differentiated portfolio of industry-leading companies led by the brightest minds in the life sciences space. The strong support we received for our third fund demonstrates the confidence our investors have in our strategy of partnering with the top scientists and entrepreneurs in the world to bring innovative, game-changing, and life-saving therapies to market.”
Dr. Diamantis Xylas, Catalio’s Head of Research, added: ‘‘Our pipeline across the biotech and life sciences space is as robust as ever, and we look forward to continuing to back exceptional scientist-entrepreneurs and identify attractive investments that deliver treatment options to patients in need and drive returns for our investors.”
Catalio has been highly active since its formation two years ago. In addition to its headquarters in New York’s Flatiron district, it opened two additional offices, in Baltimore near Johns Hopkins Medicine and on London’s Baker Street; added talent across all facets of the organization, which has grown to over 28 employees; and invested in 45 companies. Other notable recent highlights include:
- Catalio led Octant, Inc.’s $80 million Series B funding round to accelerate the advancement of precision medicines for complex diseases, and invested alongside Andreessen Horowitz Bio Fund and Bristol Myers Squibb in April 2022;
- Catalio seeded Pheast Therapeutics, founded by Stanford University’s Dr. Irv Weissman, and co-led its launch and $76 million Series A funding round to develop novel checkpoint therapies to fight cancer in April 2022 (Dr. Weissman is also the founder of Forty Seven, Inc., which was acquired by Gilead for $5 billion in 2020);
- Five Catalio portfolio companies went public over the last year, including Recursion Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: RXRX), Compass Pathways (NASDAQ: CMPS) and ATAI Life Sciences (NASDAQ: ATAI);
- Catalio portfolio company Thrive Earlier Detection, founded by Catalio Venture Partner Dr. Bert Vogelstein at Johns Hopkins, was acquired by EXACT Sciences (NASDAQ: EXAS) for $2.15 billion in January 2021;
- Catalio participated in Series A funding for Affini-T’s, a cell therapy company founded by Catalio Venture Partner Dr. Phil Greenberg at Fred Hutch in March 2022 (Dr. Greenberg was also the founder of Juno Therapeutics, acquired by Celgene for $9 billion in 2018); and
- Catalio portfolio company Personal Genome Diagnostics was acquired by LabCorp (NYSE: LH) for $500 million in February 2022.
