After Ten Years
The firm marks a decade of strategic investing, and a portfolio that ran the full loop from licensed molecule to acquired clinical asset.
Twenty-three companies; eleven syndicate seats with ARCH, GV, or Polaris; one full build-to-buy. The work, mostly, is more ordinary than the headlines.
FILED · MAY 2016In the spring of 2016, three people sat in a windowless room above a parking lot in Menlo Park and tried to write down what the firm was for. The page they produced is not interesting. The work that followed it is.
Taiho Ventures was founded as the strategic investing arm of Taiho Pharmaceutical, a Japanese mid-cap oncology house with a hundred-year history of small-molecule chemistry. The firm was given a checkbook, a brief, and very few rules. The brief, in plain words, was to find the medicines that Taiho would not have found on its own — and, where the science warranted it, to bring them home.
Ten years on, the record is mixed in the way an honest record is. There are twenty-three portfolio companies. There are eleven syndicate seats taken alongside ARCH, GV, and Polaris. There is one company — Cullinan Pearl, founded in 2017 around an EGFR inhibitor licensed out of Taiho Pharmaceutical — that was acquired back into the parent in 2023, after the asset cleared its proof-of-concept readouts. This is what the firm calls a build-to-buy. The phrase is plainer than the work.
Most of the work, however, is more ordinary. A board observer chair. A quarterly check-in with a founder who is two clinical readouts away from knowing whether the molecule holds. A conviction, slowly assembled across four years, that a target the rest of the table walked away from is the right target.
This issue is a record of the decade, written in the firm's own voice, set in the form the firm prefers: plainly, on paper, in columns.
