Over the past few years, venture capital has become increasingly difficult to obtain, even for companies with strong track records.
That's been the experience of Foresight Capital: Despite having done 47 IPOs, 28 M&A deals and 58 FDA-approved drugs, it took the 13-year-old multi-stage healthcare and life sciences firm two years to raise its sixth fund.
“Almost all of our LPs from Fund 5 have renewed for Fund 6. They just renewed with 30% less capital,” Foresight CEO and founder Jim Tananbaum told TechCrunch. “We needed to fill a little hole.”
The San Francisco-based firm was determined to ensure its sixth fund would not be significantly smaller than its fifth fund, which totaled $969 million and was made up of a $775 million core fund and a $194 million companion opportunity fund. Foresight hired Hadi Tabaa to fill the funding gap and lead the firm's broader investor relations efforts. Tabaa, formerly with B Capital and Coatue Management, has helped the firm land new LPs, including family offices in Asia and the Middle East.
Foresight announced Wednesday that it had closed its sixth fund on $900 million.
The firm began investing with Fund 6 about two years ago and has backed a number of interesting companies in that time. Foresite made headlines in April when its accelerator, Foresite Labs, along with ARCH Venture Partners, invested $1 billion in incubating AI drug discovery startup Zyra. Tananbaum also highlighted the firm's recent participation in Latigo Bio's $135 million Series A, a clinical-stage biotech company testing a non-opioid painkiller.
Last summer, Foresite co-led a $115 million Series F investment in CG Oncology, a drug discovery company that successfully completed an IPO in January.
ForeSight plans to back about 20 companies from its sixth fund and write checks ranging from a few million dollars to $75 million. “More than 10 years ago, I named my company ForeSight because I knew where health care was going,” Tananbaum says. “I felt that the combination of genomic science and artificial intelligence would lead to the ability to personalize care delivery.”
These remain big focus areas for the company.