In an apparently unprecedented move, Eli Lilly is partnering with the fabled venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz on a new fund backed with $500 million of the drug giant’s money.
Most drug companies have venture funds, which they use both to make investments and to scout out potentially important scientific and technological trends. But it is unusual for a drug giant to co-manage a fund with an existing venture capital firm, or for a venture capital fund to source its capital from a single company. The fund will be called the Biotech Ecosystem Venture Fund.
Vineeta Agarwala, a partner at Andreessen’s biotech arm, a16z Bio + Health, said the deal aims to combine “bleeding edge technology” in drug development from entrepreneurs with the “extraordinary depth in R&D experience” from Lilly’s executives. “That’s kind of what collaboration as deep as this provides, for the very first time.” (The a16z abbreviation derives from the 16 letters between “a” and “z” in the firm’s older moniker.)
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