Vol. VIII · No. 1Spring Edition
Taiho

Taiho Ventures

The strategic capital arm of Taiho Pharmaceutical

The mandate · Essay

MENLO PARK — MAY 2026

A vial of an early-stage molecule, reviewed in Menlo Park before a Series B closes. The line on the cap table will read Taiho Ventures, in eight-point font, on the second page.

The line below the lead.

Top-tier institutionals price the science. We are after the line that sits underneath theirs on the cap table.

On strategic capital, optionality, and the eight-point font that founders remember.

By the partnership at Taiho Ventures

On a Wednesday in February 2017, a clinical-stage oncology company in South San Francisco closed a Series B led by a top-tier institutional fund. The deal was oversubscribed; the term sheet had been on the table for six weeks. What the founder remembered later, though, was not the lead investor or the round size. It was the smaller check on the second page of the cap table. The pharma. The strategic. The line that read Taiho Ventures in eight-point font.

What interests us about a Series B is rarely the round itself. The institutionals do the work of pricing it; the science either holds up in diligence or it does not. The interesting part is the line below the lead — the global pharmaceutical company that has signed off on the molecule before any of the obvious buyers have. By the time the asset reaches Phase II, that line has done more for the company’s optionality than the dollar amount it represented.

This is the page where we write down what we have noticed since 2018. We invest in oncology, immunology, and a small number of adjacencies where Taiho’s clinical and regulatory experience earns its keep. We co-invest with the funds you would expect us to co-invest with. And we keep the check small enough that the line below the lead is the line we have actually earned.

Read the case for our 2024 portfolio →

Dispatches · Section A · The mandate

Continued from page A1

The mandate

p. A2

What we look at, and what we do not.

Oncology and immunology, mostly. The adjacencies are smaller, slower, and chosen for what the parent already knows.

By the partnership

The mandate is narrower than people assume. We invest in oncology and immunology because Taiho’s clinical and regulatory experience earns its keep there. We invest in a small number of adjacencies — rare disease, certain delivery platforms, a single cell-therapy thesis we have held since 2019 — because the parent firm has spent thirty years learning what to make of a molecule once it works. We do not invest in digital health, in tools companies that do not produce a molecule, or in anything that asks the strategic for a logo and a check. The mandate decides what we read; it also decides what we politely decline.

A note on the cap table

p. A3

The eight-point font.

On the second page of the cap table, the line a founder remembers.

By M. Ueda, Partner

A founder once told us that the line on the cap table that mattered to her, three years after a Series B, was not the lead investor. It was the strategic on the second page. The lead had repriced; the strategic had not moved. That line, set in eight-point font, was the only one she had volunteered to acquirers without being asked. The work of strategic capital is to be that line, and to be it long enough that the asset reaches the audience it deserves.

On time horizons

p. A3

By the time it reaches Phase II.

A long-horizon position, said plainly.

By H. Sato, Partner

Strategic capital is comfortable looking three years out because Taiho is. The parent firm has built a forty-year business on molecules whose payoff arrived a decade after the first investment. The venture arm reads the same calendar. We are happy to write a small check at a Series A and to sit on the company’s second board observer seat until the asset reaches Phase II. The compounding of that patience is the part the cap table never quite captures.

Portfolio · Section B

p. B2

The ledger, abridged.

Selected positions held by Taiho Ventures, LLC, as of the quarter ending March 31, 2026. Stages reflect lead asset, not corporate stage. Round size is the most recent priced equity round.

Past performance is not indicative of future results. Round figures rounded to the nearest five million USD. Stages and syndicate roles are point-in-time at the most recent priced round.

Long read · Case study · Section C

p. C1

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — APRIL 2026

The case for Cullinan Pearl, in three acts.

A small molecule for a narrow second-line indication, an asset team that learned its discipline at a parent firm, and a co-investment we wrote in 2021 because the geography of the cap table looked exactly right.

By M. Ueda, Partner

In the spring of 2021 a Cambridge oncology company we had been watching for two years closed a financing led by an institutional crossover with a long history in solid tumors. The asset was an EGFR exon-20 inhibitor called zipalertinib, in second-line non-small-cell lung cancer — a small population, a specific resistance mutation, a class that had cost three companies before this one their best clinical years. We wrote a small check on the second page of the cap table, alongside a syndicate we had co-invested with twice before.

What interested us was not the asset, exactly. The asset was good, and the institutionals priced it accurately. What interested us was the team’s discipline. The chief medical officer had spent a decade at a Japanese parent firm running registrational trials in difficult populations; the chief executive had built and sold a urology asset to a major pharma three years earlier. They had read the same operations manual we had. The cap table read like an alignment statement before any work began.

Three years later, the asset has Breakthrough Designation. The company is public. The line that reads Taiho Ventures still sits on the second page of the cap table, in eight-point font, where it has been since the close. That is the exact position the work was for.

Continue reading on p. C2 →