GlenRock Israel, controlled by chairman and CEO Leon Recanati, is to set up a new life sciences investment fund, called Rainbow, which will establish and invest in companies based on ideas from serial entrepreneur Yossi Gross. Glenrock will be joined by other investors in the new fund, which will establish 15 companies based on new patents that Gross is set to register. Each company will have a separate manager, but the entire venture will be managed and overseen by former Amgen VP Efi Cohen-Arazi, who returned to Israel a few years, and Glenrock managing partner Ziv Kop.
Forming a venture on the basis of the inventions of one person alone is, without doubt, an extraordinary risk for an investment company to take, but Gross's track record explains why Glenrock are more than willing to take such a risk. Yossi Gross is listed in IVC Online as having founded 30 companies, nearly all of which are based exclusively on his ideas. Among them are several companies that have already shown great promise and have raised tens of millions of dollars, such as VisionCare Opthalmic Technologies Ltd., BioControl Medical Ltd., TransPharma Medical Ltd., BrainsGate Ltd., Betat-O2 Technologies Ltd., and GIView Ltd.. Gross's companies have not reached the market (save for BioControl's cardiac stimulation device), but his ideas, which are always creative and groundbreaking, have been found to be practical, and clinical trials have shown the devices to be effective.
Kop said, "The idea behind this venture was that an entrepreneur that sets up companies on his own usually finds himself spending more than half his time raising money and attending to administrative tasks, activity that stops him from contributing his potential added value in full. We will take all the administrative activity off Gross and the managers of the future companies, enabling them to get on with managing companies, in a manner that we will determine on the basis of our experience. We believe that this will ensure the work is both much faster and of a higher quality."
Glenrock plans to make seed and early stage investments in each of the companies and then bring in other investors. It said that life sciences venture capital funds do not see its activity as competing with theirs, but they actually welcome it since they prefer, in any case, to invest in more mature companies.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes.co.il - on October 15, 2007
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