Dimension raises $500M second fund for investing on the intersection tech and life sciences | TechCrunch

Many VCs, notably newer corporations, readily admit that 2024 has been a difficult 12 months for elevating recent capital.

Dimension Capital, a two-year-old enterprise outfit, had a unique expertise when elevating its second fund.  

“Each investor from fund one got here again in a short time,” stated Zavian Dar (pictured middle), one of many agency’s three founders and managing companions. Dimension additionally introduced in a small variety of new traders, however ended up “turning away the overwhelming majority of LPs who expressed curiosity.”  

Lower than two years after closing its inaugural $350 million fund, Dimension introduced that it raised an oversubscribed $500 million fund, exceeding its $400 million goal.

Dimension’s attraction is its distinctive give attention to investing on the nexus of life sciences and know-how, an space that has gained recognition lately because the promise of drug discovery with synthetic intelligence (alongside a much bigger push to construct AI right into a more medical purposes) appears nearer than ever. In truth, Dar claims that the outfit is the primary VC agency devoted solely to “bridging the hole” between biology and laptop science.

Since its founding in 2022 by Dar, who was beforehand a normal companion at Lux Capital; one other Lux investor, Adam Goulburn (pictured on the fitting); and Apparent Ventures alumnus Nan Li (pictured on the left), Dimension has invested in about 20 firms. About half of Dimension’s startups are nonetheless in stealth.

As for the agency’s recognized portfolio firms, they embrace Chai Discovery, a startup that’s creating an open-sourced AI foundational mannequin for drug discovery. In September, Chai raised $30 million in seed funding led by Thrive Capital and OpenAI, with Dimension’s participation. The agency has additionally backed Enveda Biosciences, a biotech that makes use of AI to develop medicines from pure compounds, which raised a  $130 million Series C final month.  

When the agency first launched, the companions stated they have been focusing totally on early-stage investing. However the focus has since expanded to all phases of improvement, from inception to public firms. Dimension invested in Monte Rosa, a publicly-traded biotech with that makes use of AI instruments for drug improvement.

The stage-agnostic method signifies that Dimension can write checks as small as one million and as a lot as $30 million or extra.  And identical to its first fund, the second will possible have about 20 portfolio firms.

Dimension’s present portfolio is roughly cut up between drug discovery firms and software program and infrastructure firms supporting biopharma, akin to a still-stealth startup that builds robots for automating lab experiments.

Dimension Capital declined to reveal names of LPs however stated extra typically that the listing consists of endowments, hospitals, and analysis establishments, amongst others.

In contrast to many conventional life sciences VCs, Dimension will spend money on biotech startups provided that “25%, 30%, even 40% of the staff are computational biologists,” Goulburn stated. “They’re machine studying practitioners, AI engineers, {hardware} roboticists which are intermingled and symbiotically working along with chemists and biologists to do the drug discovery.”

Dar stated he has been impressed with the founders who selected to start out companies within the sector.

“One of many superb issues about this second is the caliber of entrepreneurs,” Dar stated. “These extraordinarily bold, technical, scientifically literate people are all coming into this area.”