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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022 BCBUSINESS 29 BCBUSINESS.CA J ust a few years ago, a typi- cal early-stage venture funding round netted $1 million, maybe $2 million, for a startup to build out its technology and get it ready for market. So what is one to make of the US$40-million Series A round fundraised by Gandeeva Therapeutics, a tiny biotech firm based out of a lab at UBC, this past January? As we chat over a Zoom call, Gandeeva CEO Sriram Subrama- niam is grinning from ear to ear. A researcher with the National Institutes of Health in Washington, D.C., for 18 years, he regards the past four as a dream come true. It feels like a whirlwind picked him up and dropped him on the shore of the Salish Sea with a mandate—and now the money—to pursue his outlandish idea for cryogenic electron microscopy. Gandeeva will use the cash to develop its platform, which creates images of proteins and then, with the help of machine learning, models how they might interact with different drugs. Subrama- niam had been talking to venture capital firms about it for a few years when UBC stepped up to fund research and take him on as a faculty member in 2018. Not long after he arrived, though, COVID-19 hit and the university mandated that anyone working on the cam- pus had to be fighting the virus. So Subramaniam set about imaging the spike proteins of novel coro- navirus variants. He ended up publishing one of the first images of Omicron's distinctive spike pro- tein, believed to make the variant more transmissible, in the journal Science. "In order for the company to get off the ground, we needed infrastructure for biochemistry, computing, microscopy. All of this had to be built," Subramaniam says. In an unexpected way, his team's forced foray into COVID-19 research not only allowed them to build the platform for Gandeeva but also gave them credibility that the technology they were developing could have potentially lucrative real-world applications. Last year smashed all records for venture capital activity in B.C. But with public markets spooked over the prospect of rising interest rates, the future looks uncertain. We asked leading investors and tech entrepreneurs what to expect next 2 0 2 2 V E N T U R E C A P I TA L R E P O RT Money Burn b y M I C H A E L M C C U L L O U G H • p o r t r a i t b y R O B E R T K A R P A to