Eric Lefkofsky’s Tempus raises $275M
Chicago biotech company Tempus has raised more funding from investors, a move it says will help it expand its precision medicine technology platform.
Tempus, launched by Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkofsky, raised about $275 million in a combination of equity and debt financing, the company said in a statement. Tempus said it sold shares to its existing investors for the same price per share as its previous fundraising round at the end of 2020, when it raised $200 million at an $8.1 billion valuation.
Tempus investors from other funding rounds include Baillie Gifford, Franklin Templeton, Google, venture-capital fund NEA and Novo Holdings. It’s unclear exactly which investors participated in this latest round. Tempus declined to comment outside of a press release.
The debt financing came from Ares Management, a Los Angeles-based private-equity firm that’s also put funds into local healthcare companies like TAG-The Aspen Group and physician group Duly Health & Care. Altogether, the new financing brings Tempus’ total funding to more than $1.3 billion.
Tempus says it will use the new funds to scale operations and build out new capabilities for its platform. The company, founded in 2015, started out by providing genomic-sequencing services to treat different cancers. Since then, it has expanded to treat other conditions, like cariology, diabetes and infectious diseases such as COVID-19. Now the company says it owns one of the world’s largest libraries of clinical and molecular data. Using this information, Tempus says it can provide “contextualized” results for each specific patient, insights that help physicians tailor and personalize treatment plans.
“In the last seven years, we’ve made great strides in developing and deploying smarter diagnostics not only in oncology, but neuropsychiatry, infectious disease, and cardiology,” Lefkofsky said in a statement. “We are committed to achieving our mission in applying AI to healthcare broadly with a focus on deploying solutions at scale that have real impact on patient care today and research in the future.”
Download Modern Healthcare’s app to stay informed when industry news breaks.
Last fall, it was reported that Tempus was exploring going public as soon as the first half of 2022. But that was before a turbulent public market this year that has resulted in one of the weakest IPO markets in years.
Earlier this year, Tempus acquired San Francisco-based Highline Sciences, a full-service clinical contract research organization that manages and executes early- and late-stage clinical trials. At the time, Crain’s reported Tempus had 1,700 employees.
Tempus’ fundraiser comes near the end of a slow venture-capital market this year, according to data from PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association. About $43 billion was invested in U.S. companies in the third quarter, a nine-quarter low. Like Tempus, many of the companies still raising funding are going back to existing investors for cash.
Despite the slowdown in VC, healthcare companies in Illinois and across the country are attracting capital at a higher rate than some of their peers in other industries. Of the 10 largest VC deals in Illinois during the third quarter, seven were with healthcare companies that spanned across pharmaceutical, medical device and health care services subsectors, PitchBook and NVCA data shows. A similar trend is taking place across the country.
This story first appeared in our sister publication, Crain’s Chicago Business.