By Bruce V. Bigelow
XCONOMY – When Avalon Ventures began fund-raising for its ninth venture fund back in May, the San Diego VC firm said it was targeting $150 million. Today Avalon plans to announce that it has closed capital commitments of $200 million for its ninth and largest fund.
Founder Kevin Kinsella says Avalon Ventures IX was more than 33 percent oversubscribed, and all of the institutional investors in Avalon’s two previous funds returned to make commitments to the newest fund. “We’re pretty happy with that,” he told me by phone.
Kinsella, who founded Avalon in San Diego in 1983, says the firm will continue to invest in early stage companies in two general areas, life sciences and digital media, primarily along the West Coast (San Diego, the Bay Area, and Seattle) and the Northeast Corridor. Avalon also added two partners for its latest fund. At its office in La Jolla, Avalon CFO Doug Downs is joining Kinsella, Stephen Tomlin, and Jay Lichter as a general partner. In Cambridge, MA, Brady Bohrmann, who was a venture partner in Avalon’s eighth fund, is joining Rich Levandov as a general partner.
Kinsella initially had expected that Avalon would close its latest fund in a few weeks. Instead it took more than six months, as the firm got a stronger-than-expected response. But Avalon already has made six investments out of its newest fund. So far, they are:
—Aratana Therapeutics, a newly formed company in suburban Kansas City with several late stage development programs to treat common maladies of domestic dogs and cats. Aratana said Friday that it closed on $20 million in Series A funding led by Avalon Ventures and MPM Capital. Aratana also announced that Linda Rhodes, a veterinarian, consultant, contract researcher and the co-founder of New Jersey-based Alchera Bio, will in February as CEO. Aratana is based at MPM’s office in Kansas City, KS.
—Backupify of Cambridge, MA, provides daily automatic backups, archiving, and export of important information that companies and individuals maintain in social media, Software-as-a-Service data, and other cloud-based applications.
—Bagooba, based in New York, NY, is an emerging company in stealth mode. Kinsella says only that Bagooba “is addressing friendship relationship management by a very experienced group of entrepreneurs.”
—Sova Pharmaceuticals, San Diego, CA, specializes in discovering and developing innovative human therapeutic drugs to treat sleep apnea and other sleep-related breathing disorders.
—RQx Pharmaceuticals, San Diego, CA, is a specialized biotech focused on discovering and developing novel broad-spectrum antibiotics, based on research into a family of natural antibiotic products known as arylomycins, which have been shown to block a particular bacterial signal pathway.
—Standing Cloud, of Boulder, CO, is an application management software company founded in 2009 to offer cloud-based services. The 13-employee company has received at least $5 million from Avalon and Boulder, CO-based Foundry Group through two rounds of venture funding. Kinsella says Standing Cloud is “the easiest way to deploy and manage web applications using public cloud infrastructure. With just a few clicks and in less than five minutes, you can be up and running with any of more than 60 open source applications.”