Family offices spent the back half of August and the opening days of September writing checks across biotech, real estate, restaurants and public markets, with life sciences again the standout theme.
Sept. 3 — SunPower raised $26.2 million in an equity private placement anchored by Foris Ventures, the family office of Kleiner Perkins Chairman John Doerr, with the balance funded mainly by other Sand Hill Road venture investors. The round comes as the solar installer works to return to profitability following a weak second quarter, and CEO T.J. Rodgers pitched investors on a stock trading at under $1 despite the company’s plans to grow revenue to $500 million next year. (GlobeNewswire)
Aug. 28 — Black Spade Capital, the family office of Macau casino billionaire Lawrence Ho, agreed to take Astrum Space public through its third de-SPAC deal, merging the Singapore-based satellite communications firm with blank-check vehicle Black Spade Acquisition III at an equity value of about $1 billion. The combined company would seek a New York Stock Exchange listing by year-end; Astrum is developing a satellite-to-device broadcast network for the Asia-Pacific region, targeting mobile carriers, broadcasters, governments and enterprise clients. (South China Morning Post)
Aug. 27 — Biryani Bees, a biryani chain incubated by Wolfpack Labs, raised $1 million from the Vivek Oberoi Family Office to expand from three outlets to 10 across Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and other Tier 2 Indian markets. The Bollywood-actor-turned-investor’s family office led the round alongside SKG Asset Management, Unistone Capital and the family offices of Sanjeev Agarwal and Brijesh Parekh; the capital will fund new outlets, central-kitchen infrastructure and a standardized playbook the company hopes to use to raise a larger institutional round for national expansion. (Restaurant India)
Aug. 18 — Obelysk, the Toronto-based family office of the Bitove family, expanded into multi-residential real estate through First Olympic Capital, its real estate investment arm, joining Peakhill Opportunity REIT to acquire two rental apartment buildings in Toronto for approximately $57 million. The 202-unit combined purchase includes a 14-storey building in North York and a 12-storey building in the city’s York submarket, partly financed through Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation-insured mortgages, and extends the reach of a family better known for SiriusXM Canada and the Toronto Raptors’ original ownership group. (Connect Canada CRE)
Aug. 17 — PagsGroup, the single-family office of former Bain Capital co-chairman Stephen Pagliuca, was among the backers of Floating Point‘s $125 million Fund III, which closed above target and brought the venture firm’s total assets under management above $300 million. Floating Point, founded in 2021 by former Bridgewater investors and Oscar Health alumni Eddie Segel and John Loser, invests in technology-driven businesses in regulated corners of the real economy, including healthcare, logistics, finance and insurance; PagsGroup has previously co-invested alongside the firm, including in the tech-enabled carwash rollup Sun Day. (GlobeNewswire)
Aug. 6 — LifeMine Therapeutics closed $263 million in financing to advance LIFE-001, an experimental drug aimed at preventing organ transplant rejection, and to fund its broader pipeline of transplantation and immunology therapies. The round comprised an oversubscribed $188 million Series E led by Milky Way Investments, with new investors Bezos Expeditions, the family office of Jeff Bezos, and Gates Frontier, the family office of Bill Gates, joining RA Capital Management and existing backers GV, LoLa Capital Partners, GlaxoSmithKline, Invus and ARCH Venture Partners. The Watertown, Mass.-based company mines fungal genomes for new drug candidates and plans to start a Phase 2 kidney-transplant study and a Phase 1b islet-cell-transplant study using the proceeds. (Pulse2)