GCV Powerlist 2018: Janis Naeve

Janis Naeve, managing director of Amgen Ventures, has headed the corporate venturing unit since 2005, a year after it was formed under the leadership of Jay Hagan with $100m.

Parent company Amgen said it had always appreciated the importance of funding early-stage innovation as it was founded in 1980 by venture capitalists and scientists.

Naeve says on the website: “At Amgen Ventures, we unlock value by making investments that match promising early innovations with more than 30 years of biotechnology experience.”

Her own experience does not reach back quite so far. Following her PhD and post-doctoral fellowship in neurobiology in California, she worked on business development at Aurora Biosciences and X-Ceptor Therapeutics from 1997 to 2004 before joining Amgen in March 2005.

For more than a decade, Amgen Ventures has invested in more than 30 emerging biotechnology companies to advance promising medicines and technologies.

For the Global Corporate Venturing annual review, Janis Naeve, managing director at Amgen Ventures, said its focus was on next-generation technologies to improve immuno-oncology and cell-based therapies. Its deals so far this year have included US-based digital medication developer Akili Interactive Labs’s $55m series C round, Aetion, the US-based creator of an analytics platform for drug developers’, $36.4m B round, and US-based synthetic biology technology startup Senti Biosciences’ $53m A round.

This continued the activity levels of the last few months of 2017 when Amgen backed Obsidian Therapeutics, which raised $49.5m with Nunez joining the board as an observer, Syapse’s $30m D round, Fortuna Fix’s $25m B round, Immatics’ $58m E round and Kymera’s $30m A round.

Probably its biggest deal was Wuxi NextCode, which achieved a final close of its Amgen Ventures-backed series B round at $240m with additional commitments from investors including Temasek.