Moderna Therapeutics Raises $450 Million In Biggest Biotech Private Round Ever

Moderna Therapeutics, a biotechnology company in Cambridge, Mass., is announcing today that it has raised $450 million from investors including Viking Global Investors LP, Invus, RA Capital Management, and Wellington Management Company, LLP, AstraZeneca and Alexion Pharmaceuticals. That appears to be is the largest private fundraising round for any biotechnology company, ever.

Other biotechnology and drug companies have raised large amounts of money. In 2012, Inatarcia Therapeutics of Hayward, Calif, announced that it had raised $210 million. Last year, Seattle immunotherapy startup Juno Therapeutics announced that it had raised $175 million. In 2010, Pacific Biosciences, a DNA sequencing startup, raised $109 million in a single round, bringing its total fundraising before it reached the public markets to $370 million.

But Moderna appears to have left all of those other big rounds in the dust. In total, it has raised an amazing $950 million, including the money it received as upfront payments from AstraZeneca ($240 million) and Alexion ($100 million) and previous rounds of investment.


The idea behind the company’s technology is that messenger RNA, the chemical messenger that takes the genetic recipes encoded in DNA out of the cell’s nucleus and into another part of the cell where they can be turned into proteins, can themselves be used as drugs. AstraZeneca received the rights to 40 drug targets focused on cardiovascular and metabolic disease as part of its deal; Alexion purchased rights to 10 programs for rare diseases.

“We saw a ton of disease areas where you basically could apply the Moderna technology and it would be potentially disruptive,” says Peter Kolchinsky Managing Partner and Portfolio Manager at RA Capital Management, one of the investors in this fundraising round. “Every disease area we looked at we could find an application of the Moderna technology. What we realized is we couldn’t afford not to invest. There is a chance that the industry will be significantly shaken by this technology.” LINK