CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Fierce Biotech) — Flagship Pioneering has raised $1.1 billion to create another batch of biotechs. The timing of the fund has Flagship peering into an uncertain future, trying to discern what opportunities will be attractive and impactful in the world that emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic.
When Flagship began raising its seventh Origination Fund in January, the novel coronavirus outbreak was low on the agenda in the West. By the time Flagship closed the fund late last week, the VC shop, like many employers, had asked office staff to work from home as the fast-rising rate of infections drove companies and governments around the world to take defensive actions.
Having led Flagship through 9/11, the Great Recession and many other volatile periods for biotech, Noubar Afeyan expects the pandemic to affect the kinds of things his VC shop focuses on, setting the stage for the seventh fund to spawn businesses designed to thrive in a changed world.
“We will have the capital, we already have the people and we think we have the ideas to generate a new generation of companies, say maybe 25 of them over the next three years, that will be born out of this next period. Now, how does the pandemic affect what will be attractive in this next period, what will be impactful and how companies can succeed in this coming period? That is something that we are highly attentive to,” Afeyan, the founder and CEO of Flagship, said.
With the world still in a state of flux, the answers to the questions posed by Afeyan are still coming into focus. But Afeyan is already convinced that some of the lasting effects of the pandemic will be in line with thinking Flagship fleshed out well before COVID-19.
