Heran Partners nears full deployment of debut fund, mulls next fundraise

It seeks to make three more deals out of its Healthtech Fund I and complete deployment of the vehicle within the next 18 months, he said. Following this, it will likely consider raising a successor vehicle, which is yet to be decided on in terms of the amount and timing. Its investors are biotech entrepreneurs, family offices and government-related institutional investors, he noted.

The EUR 75m vehicle has been deployed across 12 investments, three of which have been exited.

The sponsor provides tickets of EUR 1m-EUR 7.5m, with EUR 5m on average for the lifetime of a company, Roelands said.

Heran Partners seeks to invest in seed-stage companies in close proximity, located in the Benelux region; it also invests at Series A-stage in Benelux and adjacent countries, such as France, Germany and the Nordics, he said.

Investment strategy
Heran takes significant minority stakes as a standalone entity or as part of the syndicate, and frequently acts as a lead investor.

It is interested in targets that are either providers of software in the health tech and healthcare space, generating insights for biotech and pharmaceutical companies and hospitals, or in medtech companies that provide hardware as R&D or diagnostic tools, as opposed to patient-related implantable devices, he explained.

It has so far made three exits, and in its exit strategy, it considers three options: companies that are capable to generate revenue for corporates tend to be sold to larger players in the industry; those that need extra revenue build-up tend to be sold to private equity firms; and the most successful ones tend to go for an IPO route, Roelands said.

In 2022, the sponsor sold a majority stake in Belgium and US-based molecular diagnostics software firm UgenTec to private equity firm Summa Equity. It also sold BlueBee, a customizable, cloud-based next-generation sequencing platform, to Illumina [NASDAQ: ILMN], a San Diego, California-based DNA sequencing equipment company. It also sold Belgian biotechnology company PharmaFluidics to US-based company Thermo Fisher, according to the sponsor’s website.

Its most recent investment is Belgian company ImmuneSpec, which developed a mass spectrometry-based approach for the identification of tumor antigens with immunopeptidomics. It also invested recently in Aspect Analytics, a company that conducts pharmaceutical research, biomarker discovery and diagnostics via bioinformatics software for spatial omics.

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