Is Miami becoming the next biotech hub for Latin America?
Pedro Penna, a biotech entrepreneur from Brazil, recently traveled to Miami to pitch his startup to leading biotech investors from Latin America and the U.S. The occasion: The November 2023 Biohunt Summit, held at the Rubell Museum west of Downtown. The event, designed to match entrepreneurs with investors, was organized by Ganesha Lab and the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC). In its second year, the conference drew some 102 investors, up from 30 the previous year.
While it’s an expensive trip for an early-stage builder, Penna considered it a strategic investment for his São Paulo-based startup, Naiad. The company creates new drugs for neuro-psychiatric conditions and cancer – and was looking to raise $5 million. “I came because everyone knows Miami is becoming the next big place for startups in biotech and pharma,” said Penna.
Maybe so, and if the crowd at the summit was any indication, Miami could soon be adding “biotech hub” to its resume. The museum’s galleries were laden with large-scale contemporary art and buzzing with “80 percent of the top biotech investors in Latin America,” said Ricardo Salomão, one of the heavy hitters himself. Salomão is co-founder and managing partner of Green Rock, a São Paulo-based venture capital and private equity firm focused on the healthcare sector. Its portfolio comprises 20 companies in Latin America, 19 of which are Brazilian and one Mexican. “Where you have funds, you have entrepreneurs,” said Salomão. Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico are leaders in biotech in Latin America.
Salomão was in town to support Naiad and MirScience, both in his portfolio of companies and both pitching at Biohunt. It was a rare chance to talk up and introduce “his” passionate founders to other investors, he said, including New York-based SOSV, a biotech venture capital firm that launched IndieBio, the first accelerator to focus on life sciences. In an inspirational opening talk about the fast growth of biotech, especially in the area of food sciences, senior SOSV and IndieBio executive Stephen Chambers said, “You can’t keep these folks down on the farm when they’ve seen the bright lights.”
The Ganesha Lab, which hosted the event, is a Miami-based scale-up that helps Latin American biotech startups grow while also providing funding. “This event stands out because, while there are bigger biotech conferences around the world such as BIO, this is the only one focused on biotech and LatAm,” said Lucas Rocha, co-founder and CEO of MirScience.
Behind this Latin American road show of talent and funding is German biotech executive Markus Schreyer, who founded Ganesha in 2017 and runs the operation. “When we first started, we were just an accelerator, but then we realized that to really succeed, we needed a fund. So, we raised $10 million, which in Latin America goes a long way.”
Schreyer previously worked in science in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, including serving as the general manager for Latin America at Thermo Fisher Scientific, a public company traded on the NYSE. “Given my experience, I saw there were a lot of high-quality life sciences in LatAm, but they weren’t converting into companies,” he said. “We can only move the needle when we build bridges.”
Among the successful startups touted at the Biohunt Summit was NotCo, a Chilean “alt-protein” company founded in 2015 and now valued at $1.5 billion. NotCo is considered an exemplary LatAm biotech startup, with products such as NotMilk, which can be found on the shelves of Wholefoods and on the menu at Shake Shack. Even Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who recently announced his relocation to Miami, is an investor, having reportedly put $30 million into the company in 2019.
