We’ve Only Just Begun — Announcing Final Close of Amplitude Ventures Fund I

Written June 17, 2021. Wrote my company's blog post announcing the final close of our first fund. You can find the original here

We are pleased to announce an over-subscribed final close for Amplitude Ventures Fund I.

In June 2018, we announced the audacious goal of raising a $200M Precision Medicine fund focused primarily on Canadian innovation. Given the historical size of life sciences funds in Canada, this was very aspirational. After years of hard work and dedication, we are pleased to announce the accomplishment of that goal. We are extremely proud of this achievement and want to extend our gratitude to our investors, entrepreneurs, and ecosystem partners for their faith, partnership and commitment.

For the past seven years, we have been pounding the message that Canadian innovation in life sciences is globally competitive and with the right vision and financing partners, this potential could be fully realized.

2020 saw the IPOs of Repare, Abcellera, Chinook and Fusion, all of which successfully listed on NASDAQ and raised substantial capital to accelerate their path to becoming foundational Canadian life sciences companies.

Following a great 2020, we’ve continued to deploy capital into several new portfolio companies this year. Notch Therapeutics, a world-leading cell therapy company, announced a US$85-million Series A. We announced the US$11M seed financing of Giiant Pharma, a precision GI company we helped create. Additionally, last month we closed two other stealth investments, each raising Series A rounds in excess of $50M.

Clearly, Canadian life sciences companies are now viewed as attractive investments by leading global investors. We see strong alignment on investment strategy and our syndication with these investors in the highest profile Canadian companies elevates us into Canada’s pre-eminent life sciences firm just 18 months following our launch. Often, we are the only Canadian-based venture fund in our portfolio companies and have been able to build strong relationships with a broad set of US and international co-investors to support the accelerated growth plans of these great Canadian innovators.

The success of our prior BDC portfolio companies like Zymeworks, Clementia, & Profound Medical as well as our Amplitude portfolio companies like Repare and Notch have served as inspiration for the next generation of Canadian innovators to dream bigger. Entrepreneurial leaders like Carl Hansen, Ali Tehrani, Clarissa Desjardins, and Lloyd Segal have proven their talent and leadership and the teams at those companies have shown that great Canadian companies can build a strong foundation here and then expand across the world.

We strongly support this aspiration and invest behind CEOs who believe in the big vision. As one of our portfolio company CEOs said, “We’re not interested in building a billion-dollar company. We want to build a $50 billion company. We all need to be in this for the long haul and we want investors who have the courage to stand there with us. I’m excited about Amplitude because, unlike other cautious and conservative Canadian venture capitalists, Amplitude wanted to place a big bet for the longer term.”

Back in 2018, we observed the potential to create world-class life science innovation clusters in Canada centered around targeted and cellular therapy in Vancouver, next-generation imaging and intelligent medical devices in Toronto, and AI and machine learning in Toronto and Montreal. We’re starting to realize this potential as we’re seeing increased deal flow of companies with fantastic science and unique business plans that are oriented toward rapid growth. This is a dramatic change over the last decade and we believe that the quality of the underlying opportunity has never been higher.

We continue to build the strength of our team, focusing on increasing depth and diversity. During the last year, we added two fantastic new team members. Dr. Juliana Muñoz, PhD joined us and she brings deep knowledge in biochemistry that is tremendously valuable as we build companies using small molecule approaches. We also added Nancy Harrison as a Venture Partner. Nancy brings over 30 years of venture capital and entrepreneurial experience in life sciences and has solidified our presence as a trans-Canadian firm.

We were pleased to add Tara Nickerson and Giles Day to our Advisory Board in the last year to add expertise to our specific areas of investment focus. Tara is COO and Founder of Maze Therapeutics, a next-generation precision medicine company for both rare and common diseases and Giles is the former CEO and founder of Distributed Bio, an antibody discovery company that was recently acquired by Charles River Laboratories.

In addition to building our core team’s capabilities, we also recently launched the Amplitude Fellowship Program. A core element of our strategy is to conceive, nourish and grow first-in-class companies to transform human health. We are recruiting outstanding scientists, engineers, and inventors who want to stay rooted in healthcare and are keen to explore the scientific impact that can be driven as an entrepreneur in the industry. The fellowship will run virtually from June through August each year with our inaugural class having just begun a few weeks ago. The fellows will work together with our investment team to explore new life science venture concepts in Amplitude’s ‘Exploration’ phase of company creation hopefully translating into new ideas with world-changing potential.

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has shown us all the importance of life sciences innovation as our industry has created new diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines for this devastating disease. The last several years have begun a new renaissance in the Canadian life sciences ecosystem and we still feel like we’re just at the beginning. We want to reiterate how thankful we are to our investors, entrepreneurs, and partners for believing in us and translating the world-class science coming out of Canadian institutions into new treatments for patients.

We’ve only just begun.

-The Amplitude Ventures Team

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