Two veterans of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation want to prop up groundbreaking upstarts in the biotech and digital health spaces. And they’ve just raised $200 million in initial funding to do it.
Boris Nikolic and Julie Sunderland, who (respectively) were the chief adviser for science and technology to Bill Gates at the Foundation and the director of programming investments, picked up $200 million for the venture fund that they formed last year, Biomatics Capital.
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Biomatics will boost firms in the big data-driven digital health and genomics space. It’s already invested in AiCure, a company that uses smartphones to see whether or not patients are taking their medications. “It’s our goal to seek out radically innovative solutions—the outliers,” said Sunderland in a statement.
The outfit plans to pour about $5 million to $10 million in initial funding into 15 or 20 companies (that figure could rise to $20 million for particularly promising firms).