Many venture capitalists, especially startups, freely admit that 2024 will be a difficult year for raising new capital.
Dimension Capital, a two-year-old venture firm, had a different experience during its second round of funding.
“All the investors from Fund 1 came right back,” said Zavian Dahl (pictured center), managing partner and one of the firm's three founders. Dimension also brought in a few new investors, but ultimately “turned down the majority of LPs that expressed interest.”
Less than two years after closing its first $350 million fund, Dimension announced it had raised an oversubscribed $500 million fund, exceeding its $400 million goal.
Dimension's appeal lies in its unique focus on investing at the nexus of life sciences and technology. This field appears to have grown in popularity in recent years due to the promise of artificial intelligence-driven drug discovery (in parallel with a major push to incorporate AI more into clinical applications). Closer than ever. In fact, Dahl claims the organization is the first venture capital firm solely dedicated to “bridging the gap” between biology and computer science.
Adam Goulburn (pictured right) is another Lux investor since it was founded in 2022 by Mr Dahl, who was previously a general partner at Lux Capital. Led by Obvious Ventures alumnus Nan Li (pictured left), Dimension has invested in about 20 companies. About half of Dimension's startups are still in stealth.
The company's known portfolio companies include Chai Discovery, a startup developing open source AI foundational models for drug discovery; In September, Chai raised $30 million in seed funding led by Thrive Capital and OpenAI with participation from Dimension. The company also backs Enveda Biosciences, a biotechnology company that uses AI to develop drugs from natural compounds, which raised $130 million in Series C funding last month.
When the company was first founded, the partners said they focused primarily on early-stage investments. But then its focus expanded to all stages of development, from founding to publicly listed companies. Dimension has invested in Monte Rosa, a publicly traded biotech company that uses AI tools for drug development.
With a step-agnostic approach, Dimension is able to write checks for more than $1 million. And like the first fund, the second fund is likely to include around 20 portfolio companies.
Dimension's current portfolio is broadly divided into drug discovery companies and software and infrastructure companies that support biopharmaceuticals, including stealthy startups that develop robots to automate lab experiments.
Dimension Capital declined to disclose the names of the LPs, but said more generally that the list includes endowments, hospitals and research institutions.
Unlike many traditional life sciences VCs, Dimension only invests in biotech startups when “25%, 30%, even 40% of the team is computational biologists,” Goulburn said. Ta. “They are machine learning experts, AI engineers, and hardware robotics experts who intermingle with chemists and biologists and collaborate symbiotically to create drugs.”
Dahl said he was impressed by the founders who chose to start businesses in this space.
“One of the amazing things about this moment is the entrepreneurial talent,” Dahl said. “All these very ambitious, technical, scientifically literate people are coming into this field.”