By the num­bers: Se­ries A rounds are bust­ing out, plat­forms are in, M&A is down, val­u­a­tions surge and 2018 looks wicked big

Every 6 months we seem to get a new round of record num­bers for bio­phar­ma. And H1 is no ex­cep­tion. 

Sil­i­con Val­ley Bank crunched the fi­nan­cial da­ta for the in­dus­try’s first 6 months of the year and came away with some star­tling con­clu­sions:

• Se­ries A rounds are ex­plod­ing. In H1 there were $2.6 bil­lion in bio­phar­ma launch rounds, com­pared to $2.3 bil­lion for all of last year.
• Plat­form com­pa­nies are all the rage these days, hit­ting on­col­o­gy-lev­el per­for­mance.
• Life sci­ences ven­ture in­vest­ing is like­ly to ex­ceed the record $17.3 bil­lion set last year. And I’ll add here that Pitch­Book just put the 6-month fig­ure at $12.6 bil­lion for the first half, which un­der­scores the red-hot num­bers for 2018.
• And we al­ready know that SVB’s IPO count hit 30 for the first half, com­pared to 31 for all of last year. And there’s no in­di­ca­tion that that is slow­ing ap­pre­cia­bly now that the Ju­ly 4 hol­i­days are be­hind us.
• It’s not un­usu­al in this en­vi­ron­ment that SVB has tracked 75 VC-backed uni­corns over the past 5 years. And with the in­vestors get­ting block­buster re­turns on these out­sized val­u­a­tions, there’s new mon­ey to go back in­to new in­vest­ments.
• With uni­corns and oth­ers at­tract­ing pre­vi­ous­ly un­heard of val­u­a­tions, the big­ger num­bers are prov­ing daunt­ing to the M&A crowd, drag­ging back ac­qui­si­tions. 

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