Stemcentrx & AbbVie
Today, we’re excited to announce that Stemcentrx, a company developing disease-specific cancer treatments, will be acquired by AbbVie in a transaction that values the company at up to $10.2 billion. This deal is a part stock, part cash transaction including $4 billion in milestone-based payouts over the next several years. Stemcentrx is Founders Fund’s largest investment to date at $300 million, and is now the largest portfolio exit in the history of the firm. We are interested in the continued success of Stemcentrx and the world will benefit from a successful combination of AbbVie and Stemcentrx.
Founders Fund exists to back exceptional entrepreneurs with bold ideas and the ability to realize them. In 2011, we met Brian Slingerland and Scott Dylla, a former technology banker and a Stanford postdoc, who had joined forces several years earlier to found a company with a simple but audacious goal: to cure cancer. When we see perfectly complementary technical and business leaders like Scott and Brian pursuing a mission as critical as this one, we go big.
Founders Fund first backed Stemcentrx in 2012 and over the following years we proactively led rounds that would make us the company’s largest institutional investor. We invested without validation from our peers and amidst constant chatter of a bubble, believing that the best companies transcend the macro environment.
Though we’ve been interested in biotechnology for years, no one would have classified us as “biotech investors” when we first invested in Stemcentrx. While the venture capital industry has trended toward specialization, every member of our team is a generalist. We’ve remained opportunistic and flexible enough to evaluate the unfamiliar, often investing in spaces before they have a name. We invested in Facebook before “social media,” in Palantir before “big data” and in SpaceX when building a private rocket company seemed outlandish.
In recent years we’ve made the conscious decision to increase our fund sizes precisely for opportunities like these, concentrating the majority of our funds in our strongest companies. In a capital intensive industry like biotech, a check of a few million does very little. An investment of $300 million, however, can significantly speed the development of potentially life-saving drugs. Much as the reusable rocket ship wasn’t built by accident, the cure for cancer won’t come about by chance. Feats of this magnitude require complex coordination and meaningful amounts of capital.
Eight years ago, Brian, Scott and their team set out towards a goal that many believed impossible. Today, we’re closer to a cancer-free world.
Congratulations to the entire Stemcentrx team.
