Errik An­der­son

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.

Fabi­an Hansen

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.

Alaa Ha­lawa

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)

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