The Last Cheques in Europe
Biotech, we were told, had entered its age of austerity. The days of bloated valuations and preclinical moonshots were over. Europe, never one to lead the euphoria, was expected to trail the correction. Yet somewhere between rate hikes and risk aversion, a strange thing happened: the continent’s life-science venture capitalists kept raising money. Quite a lot of it, in fact.
While American funds trimmed their ambitions (and their headcount), Europe’s grandees quietly reloaded. Some returned with bigger funds, broader mandates, and more exits than a fire drill. Others doubled down on esoteric strategies—radiopharmaceuticals, royalty finance, or AI drug design—preferably all at once. The headlines may have screamed winter, but for these firms, it was a mild autumn at worst.
What follows is a survey of the European houses still writing cheques—and, crucially, still getting them back. There are no silver bullets here, but there is pattern recognition: big funds, big discipline, and even bigger patience. For founders who mistake capital for consensus, consider this a gentle correction. And for LPs looking to park euros somewhere more productive than Frankfurt’s bond market—welcome home.
Parisian panache with Lombard grit—kicked off 2025 by casually dropping €1.2 billion of fresh ammo into the life-sciences trenches, lifting assets past the €4 billion watermark and proving that continental venture still has cash to burn when the thesis is right. The raise, spread across its multi-strategy platform, pledges dry-powder for as many as 60 new companies—translated: three years of deal flow at full throttle. Capital, however, is moot without exits; July 2024’s $1.05 billion AstraZeneca buy-out of Amolyt Pharma returned a pile of euros to limited partners and signalled that rare-disease peptides are still M&A catnip. Armed with a bolstered balance sheet, Sofinnova is re-tooling: one sleeve hunts synthetic-bio fermentation assets, another bankrolls crossover rounds abandoned by U.S. tourists, and the Milan accelerator offers bench scientists hardware grants in exchange for first refusal on spin-outs. The cost of admission is discipline: milestones are dated, governance teeth are sharp, and tranche locks bite at the first hint of drift. The upside? Follow-ons never stall; in a funding winter, a €1.2 billion war-chest means Sofinnova sets the price when others blink. For insiders the tell-tale sign is sovereign-wealth appetite—state funds queued for the oversubscribed close, wagering that peptides and microbes will out-earn hydrocarbons in the next cycle. In short: if you have data, not vibes, this is the house—just mind the espresso-strength term-sheet.
Forbion wears clogs but thinks in dollars. In October 2024 the Dutch-German syndicate unveiled a record €2.2 billion across Growth Opportunities III and Ventures VII, hoisting AUM to €5 billion and giving Europe its biggest single life-science raise. Barely were the stroopwafels digested before Mariana Oncology, seeded by Forbion, accepted Novartis’ $1 billion upfront (plus $750 million milestones) to join the radiopharma gold-rush—Forbion’s fifth billion-plus exit in twelve months. Add Novo Nordisk’s €1.025 billion swoop on Cardior and you have a sniper’s tally, not a scatter-gun. The playbook is brutally efficient: pick single-asset therapeutics with clear biology and an obvious acquirer, de-risk through platform diagnostics, and flip pre-Phase III. Pension clients adore the reliability—Fund VI sports a DPI multiple north of 1.2x after just three years. Radiopharma is now the new toy, CRC isotope supply chains included; cardiovascular RNA is next. For founders, the warning label reads: “clinical precision required.” Miss a milestone and the tranche freezes; meet it and the cheque clears before sunrise. In capital-starved 2025, Forbion’s velocity may be the continent’s quickest route to a billion-euro exit. Less Netflix thriller, more Swiss watch—mercifully predictable.
Nordic private-equity polish meets Amsterdam biotech grit. March 2024 saw EQT LS (née LSP) co-lead a €128 million Series B2 for Tubulis, one of Europe’s fattest ADC rounds. Five months later Endotronix, its heart-failure sensor play, was sold to Edwards Lifesciences in a deal rumoured around $1.2 billion. Two months after that Novo Nordisk paid up to €1.025 billion for RNA-cardio darling Cardior, another portfolio gem. Exits prove the model: huge cheques, deep-dive operating partners and a data desk that tracks reimbursement codes as fiercely as biomarkers. Post-re-brand, cheque sizes ballooned—€30 million is “seed”—yet governance stayed Dutch-precise. Expect fortnightly board meetings, dashboards everywhere, and a shadow operations team that quietly fixes CMC grief before it reaches the agenda. The bet is clear: Europe’s science, priced at half U.S. comps, plus EQT’s buy-out muscle equals inevitability—IPO window or not. Thrilling if you love dashboards, brutal if you prefer vibes.
If Sofinnova is an orchestra and Forbion a sniper, Medicxi is a watchmaker crafting single-asset start-ups until pharma bangs on the door. December 2024: Ottimo Pharma debuted with a $140 million Series A for a bifunctional PD-1/VEGFR2 antibody—all designed in-house. May 2025: Fore Biotherapeutics topped up with $38 million to push plixorafenib, again with Medicxi prints all over the cap table. Boards rarely exceed five people, burn-rates sit 40 % below peers, and exits arrive within four years because romance is forbidden. 2025 adds machine-learning to the chemistry: accept Medicxi’s AI optimisation or raise elsewhere. Founders craving empires may feel suffocated; pragmatists with one killer molecule find the continent’s quickest lab-to-liquidity conveyor belt. In a market allergic to binary risk, that ruthless clarity is oddly comforting.
Syncona is the curiously British experiment of stapling venture creation onto a public trust. November 2024 delivered vindication when portfolio jewel Autolus won FDA approval for Aucatzyl, a CD19 CAR-T for adult ALL. Share-price uptick aside, the milestone pumped NAV, fully disclosed in Syncona’s no-place-to-hide quarterly. Strategy: £25–£50 million into gene- or cell-therapy spin-outs, bankroll through Series C, list on Nasdaq, hold indefinitely. EMA approval beckons next, which could sprinkle another NAV pop. Cash reserves stand near £720 million, enough for three newcos even if Wall Street stays shut. Tortoise, not hare—measured in survival curves, not headline velocity.
Novo Holdings is an economic weather system fuelled by Wegovy royalties. December 2024: it swallowed Catalent for $16.5 billion, then flipped three sites to Novo Nordisk for €11 billion—vertical integration writ large. April 2025’s performance report bragged of DKK 60 billion (€8 billion) in total income and returns, nearly double 2023. Of €4.6 billion invested last year, climate-bio and mega-credit deals joined the therapeutics stable. Time-horizon is generational, diligence exhaustive, cheque sizes breathtaking. If your science shrinks supply-chains or carbon footprints, the phone will ring; just prepare for a moral audit where “societal value” weighs as much as IRR.
Abingworth (Carlyle Life Sciences)
Equity is passé; royalty finance is the new black. 2024 saw Abingworth pledge $150 million to Teva’s dual-action asthma inhaler, swapping trial risk for future sales slices. Now it is raising a $1.5 billion Clinical Development Fund to bankroll eight late-stage programmes by 2027. Eighty percent of funded drugs win approval—actuarial wizardry versus industry’s 55 %. Carlyle’s heft means real-estate, credit and royalty securitisation sit next door: suddenly Abingworth is a full-stack life-science bank. The Faustian trade-off? Hand over royalties to extend runway—but liquidation awaits the unwary. In 2025 capital is conditional; Abingworth wrote the fine print first.
Andera rarely shouts; it signs. January 2025: the Parisian quiet-operator joined Sofinnova in a $76 million Series A for Bioptimus, Europe’s “GPT-for-biology” hopeful. The move signals a barbell strategy: AI-bio glamour on one side, meat-and-potato clinical assets on the other, funded by exits such as Amolyt’s $1.05 billion sale to AstraZeneca. Boards are Socratic, term-sheets rational, and ESG vetoes lurk for cap-table shenanigans. BioDiscovery VII is whispering about a €600 million hard cap, proof that LPs value quiet competence over bombast. Europe’s hangover needs arithmetic, not manifestos—and Andera supplies it, elegantly.
Europe’s biotech financiers are not easily flustered. They have weathered a pandemic, political turbulence, and the brutal return of monetary gravity. What distinguishes the firms profiled above is not just their ability to raise capital in lean times, but their refusal to romanticise the process. They build quietly, exit deliberately, and treat hype the way a Swiss banker treats colour: with suspicion.
If there is a lesson here, it is that venture capital is not dead—it is merely maturing. The days of frothy valuations and PowerPoint IPOs may be gone, but in their place is something more durable: platforms with operating discipline, syndicates with memory, and an investment thesis that doesn’t collapse when the ten-year yield rises 20 basis points.
The next bull run, when it arrives, will not be led by those who shouted loudest during the bust. It will be shaped by the ones who kept deploying, kept recycling capital, and quietly built the next generation of European biotech. If you’re fundraising, take note. And bring a real budget.
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