Participated · Series C · Jun 2021

Lyndra Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing long-acting oral therapies using its LYNX drug delivery platform. The LYNX platform creates weekly oral medicines enabled by over 50 patented innovations and is licensed exclusively from the Bob Langer and Gio Traverso laboratories at MIT. Lyndra’s lead product candidate is oral weekly risperidone (LYN-005), which is near completion of a pivotal Phase 3 study, and the company is also advancing weekly formulations of dapagliflozin (LYN-045) and aripiprazole (LYN-006). Proceeds from recent financings are intended to support completion of the risperidone Phase 3 trials and continued development of the pipeline of oral weekly therapies. Since its founding, Lyndra has received product funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the NIH, AbbVie, and Gilead Sciences. The company is headquartered in Watertown, MA and operates a GMP manufacturing facility in Lexington, MA. Lyndra Therapeutics develops long-acting oral therapies using its proprietary LYNX drug delivery platform. Its lead candidate, LYN-005 (oral weekly risperidone), has dosed the first participant in a pivotal trial for schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. The LYNX platform is designed to deliver a week’s worth of medication in a single oral capsule. The company recently raised capital as part of a larger offering and previously completed a $60.5 million Series C in 2021. Financial updates include a $20.3 million placement from investors as part of the current offering. Lyndra Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biotechnology company pioneering an oral ultra-long-acting, extended-release capsule designed to reside in the stomach and provide linear drug release for a week or longer. Its lead candidate, LYN-005, is a once-weekly oral risperidone formulation that showed encouraging Phase 2 proof-of-concept data indicating a more consistent pharmacokinetic profile and reduced dosing frequency. The company plans to advance LYN-005 into pivotal trials and prepare for U.S. commercialization, with an expected pivotal start later this year and a launch a few years thereafter. Lyndra is expanding its CNS pipeline assets and actively evaluating high-value partnerships across a broad range of disease states. The platform targets areas where non-adherence is a major driver of outcomes, including schizophrenia, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and opioid use disorder. Lyndra has collaborations and funding engagements including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the NIH, and has raised almost $250 million in total financing inclusive of the most recent round. Lyndra Therapeutics is developing once-monthly oral dosage forms, including a combination contraceptive designed to deliver continuous estrogen and progestin. Its core technology is a star-shaped formulation contained inside a capsule that opens in the stomach, releases active pharmaceutical ingredients consistently for up to a week or longer, and then exits via the gastrointestinal tract. The current program is focused on demonstrating once-monthly gastric residence and building a once-monthly oral combination therapy. Preclinical evaluation will be conducted in collaboration with Routes2Results through additional funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation awarded Lyndra a $13M grant for the contraceptive program and also awarded a separate grant for a long-acting malaria drug. The foundation invested in Lyndra’s recent Series B; those Series B proceeds will be used for Phase II clinical trials, expansion of the Phase I pipeline, and manufacturing scale-up. Lyndra is led by CEO and co-founder Amy Schulman and is based in Watertown, MA. Lyndra Therapeutics develops orally administered ultra-long-acting, sustained-release therapies designed to deliver steady-state release of one or more drugs for up to a week or longer while temporarily residing in the stomach. Its platform uses a star-shaped formulation inside a capsule that opens in the stomach, releases active pharmaceutical ingredients consistently over time, and then exits the gastrointestinal tract safely. The company aims to replace daily dosing with weekly or monthly pills to improve medication adherence, reduce side effects, and lower healthcare costs. To date the dosage form has been safely administered in 50 subjects during Phase I clinical trials in Australia, and Lyndra received a Notice of Allowance from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for related intellectual property. Lyndra is moving toward submitting an IND for a long-acting schizophrenia pill in 2019 and anticipates starting a Phase II clinical trial in 2020 while advancing other candidates through Phase I–III. The company recently raised new financing to support clinical development and manufacturing scale-up.

Participated · Equity · Apr 2020

Perfect Diary is a Chinese cosmetics brand founded in 2016 that grew its initial following via social commerce platforms such as Xiao Hong Shu (Red) and WeChat. The company is best known for products like lipsticks and was a top seller on Alibaba’s Tmall during major 2019 promotional events. By June it had opened about 100 brick-and-mortar stores in cities including Guangzhou, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Suzhou, and it planned to expand to 600 stores nationwide by 2022. The broader Chinese cosmetics market has been rebounding from COVID-19, with H1 sales nearly flat year-on-year and strong month-on-month growth in July and August, which provides a favorable backdrop for the brand. Perfect Diary has signaled plans to pursue an IPO in the U.S. before the end of the year with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley named as underwriters. The company declined to comment to reporters on the recent financing and IPO plan. Yatsen owns the popular cosmetics brand Perfect Diary and is based in Guangzhou. Perfect Diary was the top-seller for cosmetics on Alibaba’s Tmall platform in 2019. In early March the company secured a new fundraising round of USD 100 million. The deal was reported to be led by Tiger Global Management and joined by Hopu Management Investments and Boyu Capital. The company is now valued at USD 2 billion. Yatsen declined to comment on the new fundraising when contacted by KrASIA.

Led · Series D · Jul 2019

Trax delivers image-recognition and retail analytics products including shelf monitoring, merchandising, activation, and shopper engagement solutions to improve in-store execution. The company is developing Signal-Based Merchandising, a new solution that leverages its computer vision, shopper audience, and crowd merchandising scale. Trax highlights AI-powered solutions, autonomous data collection methods, and on-demand merchandising capabilities as core innovation areas. Its platform enables customers to understand and improve what is happening on the shelf in every store. Trax serves 32 of the top 50 CPG brands worldwide. The company operates globally with hubs in the United States, Singapore, Israel, Hungary, Beijing, and Mexico and is focused on growth and a path to profitability in 2024. Trax provides a cloud-based retail analytics platform that combines proprietary computer vision, machine learning, IoT-enabled cameras, robots and smartphone images to track shelf availability, pricing and planogram compliance. Its flagship product, Retail Watch, gathers real-time shelf data, sends low-stock alerts, corrects pricing errors and supports online ordering and store fulfillment; Trax plans to expand Retail Watch into fresh food and produce. The company also develops Dynamic Merchandising (a partnership with Flexforce and Shopkick) and Dynamic Workforce Management, and acquired the Shopkick rewards app in 2019. Trax says it serves customers in more than 90 countries and operates offices across Asia, the Americas and Europe. The new funding will be used to invest in global go-to-market strategies, accelerate growth, triple-down on R&D across vision, machine learning, IoT and marketplace technologies, and expand use cases internally and via potential acquisitions. Reports have surfaced about a possible IPO, but CEO Justin Behar declined to comment. Trax is a retail technology company that uses computer vision to help brands understand how their products look, perform and compete on the shelf. It works with consumer goods companies such as Nestle and Henkel and with retailers to track in-store product performance. In 2017 Trax began a partnership with Nielsen to digitize the shelf and provide more frequent, accurate measurement of product representation and its influence on sales. The company is headquartered in Singapore but conducts the majority of its research and development out of Israel. According to reports, Trax raised $100 million from China-based Hopu Investments at a $1.2 billion pre-money valuation, a round that was reported to make it Singapore's second unicorn. Since its founding in 2010, Trax has raised nearly $387 million in total; previous backers include Warburg Pincus and DC Thomson Ventures. Trax builds a computer vision platform that processes in‑store photos taken with mobile devices to deliver granular shelf- and store-level insights, used for in-store execution, market measurement and data science. The company serves Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands and retailers and operates in over 50 countries with more than 175 client engagements. Trax has partnered with Nielsen to offer a Shelf Intelligence Suite that helps brands measure and improve shelf strategy and execution. It is also engaged in digital transformation pilot projects with global retailers to provide continuous shelf tracking using wireless IoT cameras. The company intends to use new funding to support global expansion and accelerate mass-market deployment of its retail solutions, with a core area of expansion in Greater China. To date, Trax has raised approximately US$235M in total financing. Trax is a Singapore-based provider of computer vision solutions for retail that processes in-store photos to deliver granular, store-level insights within minutes. Led by CEO Joel Bar-El and CCO Dror Feldheim, the company combines fine-grained recognition, machine learning and data collection methods to build a proprietary retail database and analytics products. Its main offerings are Retail Execution (mobile shelf capture and real-time corrective-action reporting), the Shelf Intelligence Suite by Trax and Nielsen (continuous retail measurement), and Retail Watch (real-time store monitoring to reduce stockouts and improve planogram compliance). Trax serves over 175 clients in more than 50 countries, including Coca-Cola, AB InBev, Nestle, Henkel and PepsiCo. The company raised $64m in funding led by Warburg Pincus and intends to use the proceeds to continue innovation and expand operations across its core markets: the US, Europe, Latin America and Asia.

Led · Equity · Dec 2018

G7 is an IoT solutions provider serving the traditional road freight industry. The company is based in China. G7 secured an aggregate of $200 million in a new funding round. The round was jointly led by private equity firm Trustbridge Partners and state-backed CS Capital. The article lists those two investors and does not disclose additional participants, operating metrics, valuation, or use of proceeds. No financing instruments or past rounds were specified in the article. G7 runs a proprietary connected platform that links trucks, shippers, fleet managers and drivers to streamline logistics operations. The company says it reaches 60,000 customers and 800,000 commercial vehicles worldwide, and counts 85% of China’s largest logistics providers as clients. It has partnered with industry players such as NIO and Total Energy Ventures to build out connected trucking and energy-related networks. G7 positions artificial intelligence in IoT, intelligent equipment and asset-as-a-service as key areas for future development. The company is eight years old and is using the latest funding to drive technological development across its platform.

Participated · Series C · Jun 2018

I-Mab Biopharma is a Shanghai, China-based company focused on developing innovative biologics in immuno-oncology and immuno-inflammation. Led by founder and CEO Dr. Jingwu Zang, the company emphasizes target biology, antibody engineering, and pre-clinical and clinical development. It has rapidly built a globally competitive pipeline and currently has more than ten investigational drugs under development. I-Mab maintains partnerships with biotech and pharma firms such as Genexine, Ferring Pharmaceuticals and MorphoSys AG, and works with CROs including WuXi Biologics and TigerMed. The company completed a $220M Series C financing and intends to use the proceeds to advance the pre-clinical and clinical development of multiple Best-in-Class and First-in-Class assets.