Andreessen Horowitz Raises $750M For Its Third Bio Fund

On Tuesday, Andreessen Horowitz (often abbreviated as “a16z”) announced it raised $750 million for it’s third fund, earmarked for biotechnology and health care investing.

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Fund III is the largest in this series of funds. Andreessen Horowitz’s previous biotech and health care funds came in at $450 million for Bio Fund II (announced in December 2017) and $200 million for Bio Fund I (announced in November 2015).

According to Crunchbase data and announcements on Andreessen Horowitz’s blog, the firm has made investments in dozens of companies in the health care, biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors.

In its announcement for Fund III, the firm’s managing directors said “[t]ech, biotech, and our healthcare system are merging—into what we call simply ‘bio.’ And whether for pharma, hospitals, or investors, bio is now officially the hot new thing.”

The firm’s portfolio companies are operating on several sides of this emerging sector.

Take Devoted Health as an example. It’s a broker of Medicare Advantage plans. Andreessen Horowitz led the company’s $300 million Series B round in October 2018.

More recent additions to the portfolio include cancer drug company Erasca and The One Health Company, which develops cancer treatment protocols for dogs, and medical data management upstart Ciitizen.

“We are now approaching a new ability to rethink bio’s biggest problems, from intractable diseases and massive inefficiencies or disparities in an overburdened health care system, to what we eat, what we wear, what we build, even how we heal our planet. And we will do this by using our most advanced technological tools, as well as the engineering principles that brought them to us,” fund managers Vineeta Agarwala, Jorge Conde, Vijay Pande and Julie Yoo said in their announcement.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias