Arie Bellde­grun and the crew at Vi­da reap a $600M har­vest for fund II — and they've got LA in their sights

This is Arie Bellde­grun’s time.

A lit­tle more than a year ago we were talk­ing about his $300 mil­lion raise for his lat­est start­up Al­lo­gene, now in the race to pro­duce the world’s first off-the shelf CAR-T af­ter sell­ing the cur­rent per­son­al­ized CAR-T leader to Gilead — and reap­ing a per­son­al for­tune along the way. Months lat­er he and close as­so­ciate David Chang were rack­ing up a then record-set­ting IPO, gain­ing an­oth­er $324 mil­lion along the way.

Weeks ago the con­ver­sa­tion fo­cused on his new com­mer­cial re­al es­tate de­vel­op­ment firm, a joint ven­ture with plans to build a string of be­spoke biotech cen­ters in hubs around the world — start­ing with a hard blue­print in Boston’s Sea­port dis­trict.

To­day, the news cen­ters on a $600 mil­lion raise for his in­vest­ment group Vi­da Ven­tures — which he co-found­ed with a group of ex­pe­ri­enced VC ex­ecs with plans to dou­ble down on a ros­ter of new biotech star­tups look­ing to break new drug ground of their own. In less than 2 years he and his crew has now raised about a bil­lion dol­lars, adding spe­cial plans to help cre­ate a new biotech hub in Los An­ge­les.

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