Australia's Brandon Capital expands into New Zealand

"The expansion of MRCF's membership network increases the opportunity for collaboration, capability sharing and knowledge aggregation," Chris Nave, managing director at Brandon and principal executive of MRCF, said in a statement. "Building a presence in New Zealand is a key part of our goal to becoming a significant international life sciences fund."

MRCF represents a collaboration between major Australian superannuation funds and more than 50 of the country's leading medical research institutes and research hospitals. According to a separate disclosure, several New Zealand research organizations, Otago University, the Malaghan Institute, and Callaghan Innovation will join this deal-sourcing network.

The fund was considered the largest of its kind upon reaching its A$200 million corpus last year, with LP commitments coming from the likes of AustralianSuper, HESTA, Statewide Super and HOSTPLUS. About A$50 million of this pool was earmarked for 20-30 seed-stage investments in biotech or medical device technologies, with the remaining A$150 million reserved for follow-on support.

On an individual basis, early-stage companies may receive up to A$3 million to support preclinical development, with those successfully progressing through this stage eligible to receive a further A$17 million.

"The MRCF funding helps promising technologies bridge the current market failure, the so called ‘valley of death', enabling them to progress beyond grant funding to a point where they have achieved clinical or prototype proof of concept and/or market validation," added Duncan Mackintosh, a specialist in technology commercialization who has been appointed as investment manager of MRCF's New Zealand operations.

Brandon closed its first MRCF in 2007 at A$11 million and its second in 2011 at A$40 million. These funds have supported companies including Spinifex Pharmaceuticals, which was acquired by Novartis for $725 million in 2015, and Fibrotech Therapeutics, which was acquired by Shire for $557 million in 2014.

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• Topics
• Australasia
• Healthcare
• Early-stage
• Venture
• Australia
• New Zealand
• seed
• Pharmaceuticals
• Brandon Capital