BIRAC Sets up AcE Fund to Help Accelerate Growth in Biotechnology

Biotechnology including medical technologies industry has the power to provide solutions to myriad challenges that we face in healthcare, food & nutrition, agriculture, renewable energy and environment remediation. It is also known that biotech product development is associated with significant risks especially it requires significant amount of capital as well as a long gestation period sometime up to 10-12 years.

Over the last 5 years, BIRAC through a dedicated and focused approach has created a significant and substantial change in the biotech entrepreneurial ecosystem of the country by designing and operationalizing early stage funding programmes such as Biotechnology Ignition Grant (BIG)- which has evolved to be the largest early stage funding program for biotech entrepreneurs and startups in the country.

Now, Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) has launched the Accelerating Entrepreneurs Fund (AcE Fund) which is a new equity ‘Fund of Funds’ exclusively for biotech start-ups which aims to partner with SEBI-registered private funds to invest equity in start-ups for providing the risk capital to undertake innovation, research and product development.

AcE Fund is to invest in and partner with SEBI-registered AIFs (i.e. Venture Funds and Angel Funds). It is intended that the AcE Fund plugs the gap of the “Valley of Death” encountered by the biotech start-ups during their product development cycle and growth phase.

The Daughter Fund is committed to invest a portion of their corpus in biotech startups with growth potential. The Daughter Funds supported by the AcE Fund will support startups at an early and growth stage that may be ready to receive pre-Series-A or Series-A funding – with a minimum commitment towards startups in the biotech space.

The Fund is aimed to make a maximum capital commitment of up to Rs. 30 crore or up to 30 per cent of the total aggregate capital commitment amount (i.e. fund corpus) in the each daughter Fund. The assistance to each of the start-up will be up to Rs. 7 crore against equity held by the Partner.

It is expected to enrich the intellectual property in the country and encourage more entrepreneurs to work towards product and technology development of high quality at affordable economies in sustainable manner. AcE Fund is being promoted by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) through BIRAC, under the aegis of Make in India initiative.