NewVale Capital closes first fund with $167M to invest in life-sciences space

BOULDER — Boulder-based private equity firm NewVale Capital LLC recently closed its oversubscribed inaugural fund with $167 million to deploy in support of companies that provide infrastructure to the biotechnology industry. 

“NewVale invests in services, software, and technologies — the infrastructure of life sciences — that have a proven return on investment for pharmaceutical customers, helping to accelerate timelines, reduce costs and improve quality,” the company said in a news release. 

The firm typically makes $10 million to $50 million investments in companies across “the continuum of the pharmaceutical value chain, including discovery, clinical, manufacturing, regulatory and commercialization,” NewVale said. 

NewVale’s inaugural fund has made three deals to date, investing in Aizon, a California company that uses artificial intelligence to improve pharmaceutical production; Argonaut Manufacturing Services, a California-based contract drug maker; and Beaconcure, a Massachusetts developer of a machine-learning-aided data validation platform. 

“While the science behind novel therapeutics has never been more promising, the pharmaceutical industry is undergoing a major evolutionary shift,” NewVale founder Todd Holmes said in a prepared statement. “To contend with its own rapid growth and formidable external pressures, the industry has been remodeling itself in ways that will make it sustainable for the decades ahead. In its evolution, biopharma has quietly become reliant on a vast and complex system of outsourced services that few have focused on, a system that now draws more than half of all dollars invested in biopharma.”