Many VCs, particularly newer firms, readily admit that 2024 has been a challenging year for raising fresh capital.
Dimension Capital, a two-year-old venture outfit, had a different experience when raising its second fund.
“Every investor from fund one came back very quickly,” said Zavian Dar (pictured center), one of the firm’s three founders and managing partners. Dimension also brought in a small number of new investors, but ended up “turning away the vast majority of LPs who expressed interest.”
Less than two years after closing its inaugural $350 million fund, Dimension announced that it raised an oversubscribed $500 million fund, exceeding its $400 million target.
Dimension’s appeal is its unique focus on investing at the nexus of life sciences and technology, an area that has gained popularity in recent years as the promise of drug discovery with artificial intelligence (alongside a bigger push to build AI into a more clinical applications) seems closer than ever. In fact, Dar claims that the outfit is the first VC firm dedicated solely to “bridging the gap” between biology and computer science.
Since its founding in 2022 by Dar, who was previously a general partner at Lux Capital; another Lux investor, Adam Goulburn (pictured on the right); and Obvious Ventures alumnus Nan Li (pictured on the left), Dimension has invested in about 20 companies. About half of Dimension’s startups are still in stealth.
As for the firm’s known portfolio companies, they include Chai Discovery, a startup that’s developing an open-sourced AI foundational model for drug discovery. In September, Chai raised $30 million in seed funding led by Thrive Capital and OpenAI, with Dimension’s participation. The firm has also backed Enveda Biosciences, a biotech that uses AI to develop medicines from natural compounds, which raised a $130 million Series C last month.
When the firm first launched, the partners said they were focusing primarily on early-stage investing. But the focus has since expanded to all stages of development, from inception to public companies. Dimension invested in Monte Rosa, a publicly-traded biotech with that uses AI tools for drug development.
The stage-agnostic approach means that Dimension can write checks as small as a million and as much as $30 million or more. And just like its first fund, the second will likely have about 20 portfolio companies.
Dimension’s current portfolio is roughly split between drug discovery companies and software and infrastructure companies supporting biopharma, such as a still-stealth startup that builds robots for automating lab experiments.
Dimension Capital declined to disclose names of LPs but said more generally that the list includes endowments, hospitals, and research institutions, among others.
Unlike many traditional life sciences VCs, Dimension will invest in biotech startups only if “25%, 30%, even 40% of the team are computational biologists,” Goulburn said. “They’re machine learning practitioners, AI engineers, hardware roboticists that are intermingled and symbiotically working together with chemists and biologists to do the drug discovery.”
Dar said he has been impressed with the founders who chose to start businesses in the sector.
“One of the amazing things about this moment is the caliber of entrepreneurs,” Dar said. “These extremely ambitious, technical, scientifically literate individuals are all entering this arena.”