Billionaire Andreas Halvorsen's Hedge Fund Backs Private Biotech Roivant Sciences

Billionaire Andreas Halvorsen’s Viking Global Investors disclosed on Wednesday that it has made an investment in Roivant Sciences, the private holding company that claims to be in the business of rescuing the pharmaceutical industry’s forgotten drugs.

Viking Global, a hedge fund that manages about $30 billion, made its investment in Roivant in December, Securities & Exchange Commission filings show. The investment was disclosed on Wednesday as part of Roivant’s announcement that it had appointed to its board Andrew Lo, a well-known finance professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. The size of Viking Global's investment was not disclosed.

Roivant Sciences was founded by former hedge fund manager Vivek Ramaswamy, who burst onto the biotech scene last year when Roivant took its Axovant Sciences public in the biggest American biotech IPO ever, raising $360 million. At the time, Ramaswamy was 29 years old. Shares of Axovant nearly doubled when they first started trading, but then sank below their IPO price of $15 and recently changed hands for $12.23. Roivant also has a stake in another publicly-traded company, Arbutus Biopharma.

Ramaswamy launched Roivant backed with $100 million from QVT, the hedge fund that once employed him, and Israel’s Dexcel Pharma. The Axovant IPO proved controversial, partly because Roivant had picked up its only asset prior to the IPO, an Alzheimer’s drug, from GlaxoSmithKline for only $5 million in upfront payments. Ramaswamy argued in a Forbes Magazine cover story that he was using financing techniques to liberate abandoned or deprioritized drugs that too often languish at large pharmaceutical companies.

Ramaswamy has been busy since the Axovant IPO. This week he announced Roivant’s launch of Enzyvant Sciences, a company focusing on Farber disease, a rare metabolic disorder. Last month, Ramaswamy announced he was teaming up with Takeda Pharmaceuticals to start Myovant Sciences. The company aims to develop a prostate cancer drug and has appointed as CEO Lynn Seely, who oversaw development of Medivation’s Xtandi, a very successful prostate cancer drug.

The addition of Viking Global, one of the nation’s biggest hedge funds, to the Roivant story suggests Ramaswamy remains well-funded as he continues to spin out companies from his holding company.