Today announced that it has raised EUR1.5 million in seed financing from Atlas Venture, a leading early-stage international venture capital firm.
VIENNA, Austria | Jan 08, 2006 | f-star, a biopharmaceutical company founded in 2006 to develop and exploit an innovative antibody engineering technology, today announced that it has raised EUR1.5 million in seed financing from Atlas Venture, a leading early-stage international venture capital firm. Prior to the most recent investment of EUR1.5 million by Atlas Venture, f-star successfully secured pre-seed and seed financing in excess of EUR1.1 million, including loans and grants from AWS, FFG and inits, the Austrian agencies for the promotion of research, technology, and innovation.
"We are extremely pleased to have won an experienced life-science venture capital company like Atlas Venture as an investor within a couple of months of f-star starting its operations", said Gottfried Himmler, CEO and co-founder of f-star. "This commitment, together with the support the Company received from local agencies since its inception in June 2006, is a strong validation of our technology and our management team. The solid financial basis we have secured to date puts us in the position to fully dedicate our resources to the optimization of our modular antibody technology, to advancing our initiatives to partner our research and development platform, and to commencing the development of our proprietary product pipeline."
"With its unique approach to developing improved antibodies and proprietary antibody fragments, f-star certainly has one of the most promising technologies with a solid IP-base in the highly attractive next-generation antibody space. We are pleased to be able to support the company right from the start," added Regina Hodits, the partner responsible for the investment at Atlas Venture.
About f-star
f-star is an antibody engineering company based in Vienna, Austria, focusing on the development and exploitation of an innovative technology to generate improved antibodies and antibody fragments.
f-star’s proprietary "modular antibody" technology allows the engineering of new binding sites into constant and variable domains of antibodies. Thus, additional functionality can be built into antibody formats of any size, including f-star’s novel Fcab(TM)-antibody fragment. f-star’s technology therefore has the potential to improve the specificity, the efficacy, and the pharmacokinetics of antibody-based therapeutics.
The Company’s technology is based on a strong and broad patent position.
For more information, visit www.f-star.com
About Atlas Venture
Atlas Venture is a leading early-stage international venture capital firm that invests in technology and life sciences businesses in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Since inception in 1980, its partners have helped build over 300 companies in more than 16 different countries. In the past decade, 44 portfolio companies have been acquired and 47 are now public companies with an aggregate market capitalization of over $15 billion. Atlas Venture manages over $2.5 billion in capital through offices in Boston, London, Munich, and Paris.
For more information, visit www.atlasventure.com.
Company contact:
Gottfried Himmler, Sc.D., M.Eng. CEO
f-star
Muthgasse 18
1190 Vienna, Austria
Phone: +43-664-4012605
Email: office@f-star.com
Media contact:
Frank Butschbacher
Investor Relations & Communications
Hauptstrasse 18 / 16a
2340 Moedling, Austria
Phone: +43-650-78-44-940
Email: office@butschbacher.net
SOURCE: f-star
