Innovative startups 2013

US firms, particularly companies from the Boston area, continue to dominate Nature Biotechnology's listing of innovative startups, ranked in order of the 10 largest A rounds. This year's list is notable for the proportion of startups focusing on experimental gene therapies; indeed, firms developing adeno-associated virus (AAV) platforms garnered three of last year's largest A rounds. A familiar group of early stage funds participated in most of the financings in Table 1, although the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia's decision to support a startup is notable. In total, the United States accounts for about two-thirds of firms receiving biotech A rounds in the broader life science field (Fig. 1); the United Kingdom ranks a very distant second. Although relatively few biotechs in France and Switzerland received A rounds, companies in those countries pulled in more on average than companies in the United States (Table 2).

Table 1 Top 10 A rounds in 2013 for innovative startups

Figure 1: Startups by country, 2013.

Source: BCIQ: BioCentury Online Intelligence

Table 2 Total, average A round by country, 2013