BAR­DA looks to get the jump on next pan­dem­ic with VC arm tar­get­ing 'trans­for­ma­tive' tech

Five years af­ter Con­gress first called for it — and a year and a half af­ter a pan­dem­ic broke out — BAR­DA, the US’s top pan­dem­ic pre­pared­ness agency, is launch­ing its own VC fund.

The new fund will in­vest in tech­nolo­gies that could be de­ployed against fu­ture out­breaks or oth­er pub­lic health emer­gen­cies. It fol­lows a sim­i­lar mod­el to oth­er pub­lic health VCs, such as the Gates Foun­da­tion’s fund, giv­ing cap­i­tal to ear­ly-stage com­pa­nies with promis­ing plat­form tech­nolo­gies in ex­change for as­sur­ances they use it part­ly for in­fec­tious dis­eases that might not have a sig­nif­i­cant mar­ket.

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