Peter Thiel jumps aboard Alloy's latest $75M round, adding some heft to the antibody discovery outfit's nascent platform

In the world of venture capital, names matter — and few names are bigger than Silicon Valley power player Peter Thiel. After making a sprinkling of plays over the past couple years, Thiel is now putting his weighty name behind antibody player Alloy Therapeutics as part of a new fundraising round.
Boston-based Alloy, which was founded in 2017, closed a $75 million Series C on Monday, headlined by Thiel’s investment. The biotech is building a human antibody discovery platform, dubbed ATX-Gx, that uses highly immunocompetent transgenic mice strains.
Proceeds from the round will allow Alloy to expand the scope of its platform as well as expand its capacity to take on more customers, according to a release. Currently, there are more than 70 companies using ATX-Gx in labs, Alloy said.
“At Alloy we are building an ecosystem of collaboration across the biopharma community to reduce the barriers of translation and make better medicines together,” CEO Errik Anderson said in a statement.

Having Thiel on board will inevitably help raise the company’s profile.
In 2017, Thiel made headlines when he invested more than $5 million in Peptilogics, an antibiotic company focused on altering drug discovery for unmet needs. Just a few months ago, Thiel also bet on AbCellera, which at the time was a little known biotech. He contributed funding and joined the company’s board as a non-executive director as it worked to develop what would ultimately become the first antibody treatment authorized for Covid-19 alongside partner Eli Lilly. They won $1.8 billion in government contracts to distribute the drug in the US. That move came shortly after Thiel spoke out against the US federal government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

8VC, Presight Capital and Thiel led the funding round, and Mubadala Capital, Founders Fund and Gaingels participated as well. As a part of the financing, Fabian Hansen, founder of Presight, will join the board of directors and Alaa Halawa will come on as a board observer.
“We have deep roots in company building, particularly in healthcare,” Halawa said in a statement. “Alloy’s ambitious long-term vision is a natural fit for our partnership.”
In December 2020, Alloy teamed up with Maze Therapeutics to create the spinoff company Broadwing Bio. Broadwing is focused on ophthalmology candidates, an area that has been lacking in innovation recently.
Social image: Peter Thiel (Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg via Getty Images)