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Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1477631
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022 BCBUSINESS 31 BOTTOM: SCIENCE It was the same worldwide. Startups around the world raised a record US$621 billion in funding, a 111-percent increase over 2020, according to research firm CB Insights. The number of global unicorns— private, venture-backed firms worth more than US$1 billion—had by February of this year surpassed 1,000. The good times were a function of two phenomena, explains CVCA board chair and Yaletown Partners co-founder Hans Knapp. One factor was the extreme low interest rates engendered by central banks to avert a COVID-19 recession. The second was the steadily mounting supply of venture money. In 2021, a rising flow of money into tech startups met a fixed number of deals. Investors were willing to buy in at higher valuations. Seed rounds that used to go for $1 million were raising $3 million and more. But as the calendar turned on 2021, spiking inflation had more and more voices calling for interest-rate hikes from central banks. The expectation that overnight rates will rise quickly from their COVID-era floor of 0.25 percent in the U.S. and Canada sent a shiver through equity and bond markets. The inflation scare has been especially hard on technology stocks. The tech-heavy NASDAQ Composite Index dropped 16 per- cent between late November and mid- April. Facebook parent Meta Platforms' stock value was cut nearly in half. And the carnage wasn't confined to American mar- kets. Since November, when it topped the Toronto Stock Exchange in market capital- ization, Ontario's Shopify has lost more than 60 percent of its value. A particularly rough week in January prompted some in the venture capital busi- ness to predict even greater losses in the private markets. "They're going to get ham- mered, especially those companies that are not profitable and will be needing capital soon," John Ruffolo, a one-time dean of Canada's venture capitalists when he ran the Ontario Municipal Employees' Retirement System's ( OMERS) VC fund and now manag- ing partner of Maverix Private Equity, told the Globe and Mail. "The music has to stop sometime," agrees Pankaj Agarwal, managing partner This time, the venture capitalists were prepared to listen. By the end of 2020, Subramaniam had held substantive discussions with New York–based Lux Capital, an early believer in the potential for imaging as a tool for advancing drug discovery. Just over a year later, Lux led the funding round with participation from two big pharma companies' own corporate VC funds, Leaps by Bayer and Amgen Ventures—one of several eyebrow-raising sums raised by B.C. firms in 2021 and into 2022. Already, though, the rising threat of inflation had brought a chill down on technology in the public equity mar- kets, leading many to foresee a similar downturn in the VC space. After the flood—drought? It's hard to overstate what a blockbuster year 2021 was, both here in B.C. and across the country. The Canadian Venture Capital Asso- ciation (CVCA) counted 753 deals collectively worth $15 billion. That compares to $6.2 billion in 2019, the last pre-pandemic year and itself one of the best in the country's history. In a release, the asso- ciation said it saw "increased cheque sizes across the ecosystem." Forty-two companies, including B.C.-based Trulioo and Dapper Labs, raised more than $100 million. And the 313 seed financings worth $1.1 billion left a "robust pipeline" of early-stage startups that will need follow-on funding sooner or later. At the other end of the venture development cycle, it was also a big year for initial public offerings, with 90 B.C. companies and 171 Canadian ones going pub- lic for $2.2 billion and $10.2 billion, respectively, according to data provider CPE Analytics. 2 0 2 2 V E N T U R E C A P I TA L R E P O RT "The data's still exploding. The prominence of the pandemic and climate change will see a continued appetite for greentech and health sciences ventures, too." –MARIA PACELLA, managing partner of Vancouver-based Pender Ventures, the VC arm of PenderFund Capital Management CRYO-EM STRUCTURE OF THE OMICRON SPIKE PROTEIN: (A) A schematic diagram illustrating the domain arrangement of the spike protein. Mutations present in the Omicron variant spike protein are labeled. RBM, receptor binding motif. (B) Cryo-EM map of the Omicron spike protein at 2.79-Å resolution. Protomers are colored in different shades of purple. (C) Cryo-EM structure of Omicron spike protein indicating the loca- tions of modeled mutations on one protomer. (D) The Omicron spike protein RBD shown in two orthogonal orientations with Ca positions of the mutated residues shown as red spheres. Single-letter abbreviations for the amino acid residues are as follows: A, Ala; C, Cys; D, Asp; E, Glu; F, Phe; G, Gly; H, His; I, Ile; K, Lys; L, Leu; M, Met; N, Asn; P, Pro; Q, Gln; R, Arg; S, Ser; T, Thr; V, Val; W, Trp; and Y, Tyr. TOUCHDOWN SPIKE Gandeeva Therapeutics raised $40 million in Series A funding, thanks to its pioneering work in precision imaging of protein-drug interactions