Amid the ongoing debate about who will be the next Prime Minister of the UK; it will be important that whoever eventually wins continues to invest in building the UK Biotech ecosystem.
Reflecting back on the last month for o2h Ventures, we are pleased to announce the successful closing of the o2h human health SEIS Fund. We executed three deals in the last month with one investment in the SEIS Fund and two investments in the KI EIS Fund.
Industry Update:
According to the latest report published by UK Business Angels Association published July 2022, there is a knowledge gap among investors in ‘science and innovation’ which is compounded by the lack of progressive angel groups around university clusters that hinders investments due to the technical assessments that are required to invest.
To check out the entire report, Click here.
This is where we believe it makes sense to invest in specialist funds such as o2h Ventures which are able to assess the validity of the science at an early stage to make an educated assessment of the viability of the biotechnology and the business. See our KI EIS Fund..
Deals Executed:
- Alevin Therapeutics – We lead an investment close to £1 Million from our SEIS and EIS fund, alongside co-investment from the University of Nottingham’s Invention Fund, into Alevin Therapeutics. The Nottingham University spin-out aims to develop assets for therapeutic applications based on their RGD Integrin platform; in particular idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), liver and kidney disease and cancer. The most advanced programme is close to a development candidate which we seek to take forward as an inhaled IPF drug. The molecule targets ɑvβ6 which very recently @pliant published Phase II clinical validating the target for their oral molecule.
- Neurofenix – We made a follow-on investment from our Knowledge Intensive (KI) Human Health EIS fund into Neurofenix: a revenue-generating digital therapeutics company developing technologies to support patients rehabilitating from Stroke. Earlier, we invested in their seed round and since then the company undoubtedly has made significant progress on both developing their product and finding a product-market fit. The founders have also moved themselves out to the USA to engage with the biggest market (a smart move!).
- Five Alarm Bio – From our SEIS investment, we invested in Five Alarm Bio, a drug discovery company based in Cambridge, UK that focuses on novel approaches to anti-aging, with a broad potential for therapeutic application. Five Alarm Bio recently won a grant BioMedical Catalyst grant of £360k and also generated data for their lead compound in collaboration with Magnitude Biosciences showing clear and impressive delay in ageing in C. elegans above and beyond many other compounds tested in the ageing research space.
We will now follow up with portfolio companies and HMRC to issue the EIS5 Certificates in the next few weeks for our investors that invested in the o2h human health KI Fund closed on 5th April 2021 and 30th October 2021 respectively as we have now deployed more than 90% of these funds.
Please feel free to reach out to us on invest@o2h.com to discuss the above updates further or in case of any queries or questions.
