Kairos Ventures Raises $58M Fund for Early-Stage Life Sciences Startups

Kairos Ventures, a Beverly Hills-based venture capital firm funding early-stage life sciences companies, announced on Monday that it has closed its third fund with $58 million raised.

Kairos said its new fund has already invested in 27 startups including Vivodyne, a University of Pennsylvania spinout that cultures human tissue for experiments, and Linnaeus, a New Jersey-based cancer therapeutics startup.

Founded in 2015, the venture capital firm is known for backing physical and life sciences startups in their infancy, often as soon as they leave the university research labs in which they were incubated. Kairos initially focused on research coming out of Caltech, Chief Research and Development Officer Alex Andrianopoulos told dot.LA last year, but has since widened its scope to around a dozen other universities and has invested in more than 55 companies.

Kairos also provides no-strings-attached grants, typically ranging between $100,000 to $200,000, to academic researchers, founder and CEO Jim Demetraides told the Wall Street Journal. That approach “builds relationships” between Kairos and those university-stage, would-be startups once they are ready for their first rounds of venture money, Demetraides said, with the venture firm having funded around 120 research programs to date, he told the Journal.

Kairos previously raised $25 million for its first fund and $85 million for its second fund, according to PitchBook Data.

The news comes after another Los Angeles-based, health tech-focused investment firm, Wavemaker 360, raised $64 million for its second venture fund last week.