Sara Jane Demy and Jeremy Levin on Where Biotech Money Goes When Venture Capital Stops

For thirty years the path was legible. A biotech founder raised a seed round, then an A, then a B, then a C, and if the science held up the company went public. Sara Jane Demy has just come out of her own Biotech CEO Summit, where that path was the main topic of conversation, and the consensus in the room was that it is not currently available.

Jeremy Levin, who ran Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and before that sat on the executive committee of Bristol-Myers Squibb, agrees with the diagnosis and has a specific answer about where the money went instead. Their conversation with host Lori Ellis covers the collapse of the venture path, the capital that quietly replaced it, and why both of them think the competitive question about China has already moved past the one most people are still asking.

The A, B, C round path is not there right now

Sara Jane Demy puts it plainly. Looking for an A round, then a B, then a C, in conventional venture funding is no longer a plan a founder can rely on.

That model just does not seem to be there right now

Her qualifier matters as much as the claim. The exception, she says, is a blue-chip management team backed by a blue-chip investor group, the kind that can raise nine figures in a single A round. Everyone else is operating in a different market from the one the playbook describes. Investments are still happening. They are not happening in the shape or at the frequency founders were taught to expect.

Where the money actually went: family offices

Levin’s answer is not a smaller version of venture capital. It is a category of capital that behaved differently ten years ago and has since organized itself.

Family offices used to hand their money to venture funds and let those funds deploy it. In several parts of the country they have now pooled directly, and the aggregate is not marginal.

which total billions and billions and billions of dollars

What makes them worth a founder’s time is the mandate rather than the size.

Their interest is novel, long term, and they’re making bets, not inconsiderable, and they should be considered.

Levin names the Miami Biotech Collective as somewhere a founder can simply go and ask what they are working on. Sara Jane Demy adds Houston, where a hub is forming around MD Anderson, and surprising Midwestern states starting to bubble up. The geography of American biotech capital is widening at exactly the moment its traditional instrument has tightened.

The rest of the non-traditional stack

The CEO summit discussion went further than private capital. Sara Jane Demy lists grant money, some of it federal, alongside collaboration money from patient advocacy organizations, disease foundations and other non-profits. For smaller public companies she describes a different tactic entirely, which is sustained public storytelling on social media to drive trading volume and, through it, attract capital.

None of this is presented as superior to venture funding. It is presented as what is actually available, and as a reason to stop treating one financing route as the only one.

Why biotech CEOs now trust Chinese clinical data

The most concrete reversal in the conversation is about credibility. Fifteen years ago, Sara Jane Demy says, the industry had doubts about the quality and the veracity of science coming out of China, and people wanted to stay away from it. That has changed.

there is a belief that the science is good and a demonstration that the science and the information that comes out of China is good and reproducible

Her evidence is what her own members say. At the Biotech CEO Summit, chief executives discussed China as a place to run clinical trials and to source research, on grounds that were practical rather than ideological. It is more cost effective and more time effective, and the data now holds up.

The question is not whether China leads, but when

Levin’s framing is sharper. He argues that debating whether China is a force in biotechnology is the wrong exercise.

The question here is not, is China a force in biotech? The question is, when will it become the dominant force?

His reasoning is about strategy rather than capability. China, he says, has articulated a clear direction for twenty-five years and built an industry underneath it, aligning capital, education, clinical trials and its regulator toward the same end. China’s own published strategy does set a 2035 horizon: the goal of becoming the world center of biological science and technology and the innovation highland of the biological industry, with pharmaceutical innovation named among the frontier technologies it is targeting. We have written separately on whether China has passed the US in research spending. The trajectory is visible in output: Category 1 innovative drug approvals rose from 12 in 2019 to 46 in 2024.

What the United States still has

Levin is direct about the disruption on the American side, and he is equally specific about what has not been lost. The engine of innovation is still here. So are the capital markets, the appetite for risk, and a base of entrepreneurs willing to build.

His warning is about direction of travel rather than collapse. If the choices are not made, he argues, the consequence is not that the work stops.

innovation won’t stop. It absolutely won’t. It’ll simply migrate.

Capital follows it. Uncertainty in a market pushes large pharmaceutical companies toward certainty, wherever certainty happens to be, and that is a decision made company by company rather than announced.

The advice, in three words

Asked what he tells founders operating in this environment, Levin does not lead with financing mechanics.

Number one, be fearless. You are the future.

The practical half is to stop assuming a single route exists. Do not get trapped in the lane that runs from seed funder to venture capitalist, he says, and go open doors that were not on the map five years ago.

The resignation written on a napkin

Lori Ellis closes by asking each guest for the hardest decision of their career. Sara Jane Demy names the choice to join the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a move she made because a friend nudged her, and reveals mid-answer that the friend was Levin. She went on to run BIO’s investor-conference and business-development program, then founded her own company.

Levin turns the question around and answers with the easiest decision that carried the biggest consequence. His management team had argued against an acquisition. By his own account he wrote out a resignation, on a napkin, and handed it over.

I, Jeremy Levin, will resign from Bristol-Myers Squibb in the event that the CTLA-4 trial does not succeed.

The company was Medarex. Bristol-Myers Squibb announced the acquisition in July 2009 at sixteen dollars a share, roughly 2.4 billion dollars, and the lead candidate it brought in was ipilimumab. Approved as Yervoy, it became one of the drugs credited with opening the modern era of cancer immunotherapy. Levin says the decision took two seconds, because if the company would not make that bet he did not want to be there anyway.