Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2016: Priyanka Rohatgi

When peers at other corporate venturing units cite your outstanding talents, you must be doing well. This is the case for Priyanka Rohatgi, a director at Baxter Ventures for the past three years.

Rohatgi joined the pharmaceutical giant in 2010, after spending four years as a research scientist at Washington University, where she acquired one of her three master’s degrees. She also holds a PhD and master’s degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She originally began her studies at Delhi University.

She spent two years in her research role at Baxter before joining Baxter Ventures in 2012. Rohatgi’s move came shortly after Baxter launched its $200m corporate venturing fund in 2011 under Geeta Vermuri. It focuses on early-stage opportunities that complement Baxter’s portfolio.

Baxter then split to form a new company, Baxalta, with the latter’s ventures unit run by Vermuri. Vermuri said of her former colleague that Rohatgi had “recently completed two deals that were started with me” and she would recommend her, along with her current colleague, Marta New, also recognised as a Rising Star in this pubication.

Rohatgi’s success has been impressive. Of herself, she said: “Over the span of four years, I was deeply involved in 11 out of the 17 companies that Baxter Ventures has invested in, as well as in three limited partnerships. Five portfolio companies have exited. Three were trade sales and two were initial public offerings.

“I was fortunate to lead many successful deals both from a strategic and a financial perspective, which led to financial contributions of more than $80m in return to Baxter, at a multiple of cost of more than 2.3 times.”

She spun out three companies from Harvard University and was the first institutional investor to lead series A round financing in two of them, Syntimmune ($26m) and Opsonix ($8m).

Her other deals included leading the $41.8m D round for Mirna Therapeutics and $38m B round Naurex, later acquired by Allergan for a $560m upfront payment, and backing Sanifit’s $41.3m series C round and Covagen’s B round. She said her other select deals were Calabash, Durata Therapeutics, acquired by Actavis for 3.4 times the invested share price, Ocular Therapeutix, Opsona Therapeutics and Precision Biologics.

Rohatgi was the primary contributor in the formation of Baxalta Accelerator, Vitesse Biologics, which had a unique build-to-buy business model in collaboration with Mayo Clinic and CMEA Ventures in haematology, oncology and immunology, with a pre-negotiated option to acquire project-focused companies after Baxalta’s phase 1 involvement.

She added: “Our white space investments were the building blocks for the formation of new franchises within Baxter, now Baxalta, such as oncology and gene therapy.”

This background gave Rohatgi a good perspective on how things could develop in the industry.

She said: “Statistics show that corporate venture capital (CVC) units invest in only about 19% of the total number of investments across all industries. Moreover, CVCs contribute only about 19% of the total dollar amount raised. Given that many CVCs do not have a stringent mandate of internal rates of return as a form of annual performance measurement and are more focused on strategic and innovative growth, higher investments by CVCs could foster early-stage innovation via seed and series A funding. This is important because there is a lack of translational innovation in larger pharmaceutical and medical devices corporations. Most today are coming from startups.

“Statistics show that parent CVC companies rarely undertake M&A and licensing activity with their respective CVC’s portfolio companies. If there were an increase in parent CVC companies executing strategic transactions with their respective CVC’s portfolio companies, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs would welcome higher CVC participation in financing and thereby benefit the entire ecosystem.”