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Thirteen years ago a little-known Munich venture-capital fund made a €13.5 million bet on a promising biotech company.
This week, that came good, as MIG Fonds paid out €340 million — on top of a 2020 dividend payout of €260 million — bringing the total distribution to MIG investors from its investment in BioNTech to €600 million ($719 million) to date.
BioNTech’s BNTX, +0.31% UK:0A3M 22UA, -0.26% vaccine against the coronavirus disease COVID-19, developed with U.S.-based Pfizer PFE, +0.23%, has been authorized for emergency use in countries including the U.S., Canada and the U.K., as well as the European Union.
The payout is the largest in the history of MIG, which was co-founded in 2005 by Michael Motschmann, who serves as a member of BioNTech’s supervisory board.
“We are proud of our portfolio company’s enormous success and their contribution to overcoming the global pandemic with the world’s first COVID-19 mRNA vaccine,” MIG partner Kristian Schmidt-Garve said in a statement on Thursday.
Read: BioNTech now plans to produce 2 billion doses of its COVID-19 vaccine in 2021
MIG made its initial €13.5 investment in BioNTech, which was co-founded by Turkish-German scientists Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, in 2008 when the company was focused on developing cancer therapies.
In October 2019, together with other investors including billionaire twins Thomas and Andreas Strüngmann, MIG led BioNTech’s initial public offering on Nasdaq, which valued the company at $3.4 billion.
Today, BioNTech’s market capitalization is more than $28 billion.
MIG, which owned almost 6% of BioNTech after its IPO, will hold less than 1% of the Mainz-based company’s stock following its recent share sale.
The venture-capital fund, which has invested around €580 million in more than 40 companies, was also an early backer of Sahin and Tureci’s first company, Ganymed Pharmaceuticals, which focused on developing a new class of cancer drugs called ideal monoclonal antibodies. Ganymed was sold to Japanese pharmaceutical company Astellas Pharma 4503, +2.76% ALPMF, +3.85% for $1.4 billion in 2016.
