New Firm OMX Ventures, Backed By Billionaire Merieux Family, Comes Out Of Stealth With $150 Million Fund for Bio-Engineering

A new venture firm, OMX Ventures, is out of stealth with its first $150 million fund for synthetic biology investments. The three founders—Craig Asher, Dan Fero and Nick Haft—had previously worked together on deals, and raised funds for their new venture during Covid-19, including from the billionaire Merieux family.

Since it began operating under-the-radar in May, OMX (named for the suffix -omics and pronounced the same way) has made 15 investments, including in microbiome startup Finch Therapeutics, blood-data collection firm Tasso, and Tara Biosystems, which makes bioengineered heart muscle for predictive cardiology, the managers told Forbes. The fund’s investments range in size from $500,000 to $15 million.

”We are focused on bio-engineering, and how that applies to developing better medicines, materials, foods and industrial products,” Asher says.

Asher, an industrial engineer, was previously managing partner of Trancos Ventures. Fero, who has a biomedical sciences Ph.D. from University of California San Diego, was previously a principal at Merieux Equity Partners. And Haft had previously been managing partner at Arcos Ventures. The three started talking about setting up their own firm in the middle of 2019, and raised funds on Zoom earlier this year.

Longtime biotech investor Paul Conley, managing director of Paladin Capital and president of General Inception, joined as a strategic advisor. General Inception, a new venture studio, will help incubate early-stage startups that OMX may invest in. “It’s not yet another healthcare fund,” Conley says. “It’s fundamentally about a transformation of the global economy to be increasingly bio-based.”

“We are focused on bio-engineering, and how that applies to developing better medicines, materials, foods and industrial products.”

The process of fundraising during Covid was “nervewracking,” Fero says. Though the fund’s investors are principally a group of family offices that had backed one of the three partners previously, Asher says, “they uniformly looked at Dan, Nick and me, and said, ‘What, in the middle of Covid, you can’t be serious?’” But a few months later, he says, they’d come around.

He declined to name the other wealthy families that have invested. Merieux Equity Partners set up a sister fund in Europe, called OMX Europe, in partnership with Korys, the investment arm of the Colruyt family, earlier in the year.

Asher, who started his career as a manufacturing engineer, points to an investment that he made in synthetic biology unicorn Ginkgo Bioworks when that firm was still small as a template for what the partners hope to do at OMX. While the firm’s $15 million investment in Finch came as part of that firm’s $90 million Series D fundraise to fight C. difficile infections, the majority of OMX’s investments are early stage, either seed or Series A. “Several of our companies are so early that they don’t even have their intellectual property published,” Asher says.

That’s where the partnership with Conley and General Inception come in. Conley points to Switchback Systems, an early-stage biotech company developing technologies that use cell structure as a data-storage medium, that is the first graduate of the venture studio. It raised a total of $2 million in December, according to venture-capital database Pitchbook. “Nine months ago it was the gleam in the eye of a technical founder we had conviction on. Now it’s a portfolio company of OMX,” he says.

Over the past few years, synthetic biology has gone from a niche idea to the basis of hundreds of companies that hope to leverage biology and data to make better food, chemicals and materials, as well as drugs. “We fundamentally believe this is going to be the century of biology, when it moves from an exploratory science to an engineering science,” Fero says. “It’ll touch everything from chemicals to industrial products to therapeutics.”