Cape Town-based OneBio Venture Studio has successfully secured a R100 million ($6 million) first close for its second fund, a significant step toward its R300 million target. This capital injection is poised to accelerate the commercialisation of life sciences across the continent. The funding marks a pivotal moment for Africa's venture ecosystem, which has traditionally favored fintech over deep-tech investments.
A Hybrid Approach to Venture Building
OneBio distinguishes itself from traditional venture capital firms by operating a hybrid model that combines investment with active company creation. Functioning as both a fund and a venture studio, it builds biotech companies from the ground up. This hands-on strategy, similar to that of Moderna-backer Flagship Pioneering, aims to translate promising laboratory research into viable commercial enterprises.
Navigating a Challenging Landscape
Executing this model in Africa presents unique difficulties, including a scarcity of wet-lab infrastructure and fragmented regulatory environments. The continent's biotech startups also contend with underdeveloped clinical trial ecosystems and a limited market for acquisitions. These factors, combined with high capital needs and long development cycles, create a formidable landscape for deep science innovation.
Portfolio Performance and Prospects
An analysis of OneBio’s portfolio reveals both the ambition and the realities of investing in African deep science. The firm has made 16 investments, resulting in eight exits but also six shutdowns, reflecting the high attrition rate of early-stage ventures. Despite these challenges, its successes demonstrate a strong capability in building scientifically sound and commercially promising companies from scratch.
Several portfolio companies signal the potential for sector-wide success, with LifeQ standing out as a global biometrics technology company that has raised over $47 million. Another success, CapeBio, capitalized on pandemic-era demand for diagnostics to establish a firm market presence. OneBio continues to build its pipeline, recently co-leading a R29 million pre-seed round for transplant medicine startup Altera Biosciences.
A Growing Trend in African Venture Capital
OneBio’s fundraising coincides with a broader shift in African venture capital, where the studio model is gaining significant traction. This approach is seen as a way to bypass early-stage volatility and address the continent's fragmented talent pools. Firms like Mstudio in Côte d’Ivoire and Delta40 in Nigeria are similarly engineering startups internally to de-risk investments.
This venture-building trend is proliferating across various sectors and regions on the continent. In Kenya, Purple Elephant Ventures is scaling tourism-tech startups, while Nigeria’s Resilience17 focuses on AI and enterprise software. South Africa’s Aions provides a compelling case study in resilience, having built 11 startups after securing crucial enterprise development backing.
Securing this initial $6 million provides crucial validation for OneBio’s long-term vision for African life sciences and its ability to bridge academic research with corporate formation. The firm has successfully demonstrated its capacity to build companies, a critical first step in a challenging market. The definitive test, however, will be whether these engineered ventures can achieve global scale and deliver the liquidity events needed to sustain the asset class.