A scientist has a promising result. The result has no chief executive, no development budget and no obvious route to becoming a business. For Polaris Partners, that awkward interval is an investment opportunity. The Boston venture firm has built part of its practice around entering before a conventional startup pitch is ready: helping research acquire the people, money and commercial purpose that a company needs.
The proposition becomes unusually concrete in Singapore. In October 2023, Polaris and other partners announced 65LAB, a vehicle designed to move academic discoveries toward new therapeutics companies. Selected projects could receive up to $1.5 million over 18 to 24 months. Drug-development expertise came with the funding. At the end, investors would evaluate whether a project justified further backing and company formation.
That sequence is the interesting part. A company is a possible outcome of the work, rather than the admission ticket. For an academic founder, the appeal is time to answer difficult questions before assembling an entire enterprise around the answer. For an investor, it is an earlier seat at the table - and earlier exposure to everything that can go wrong.
- 01Select the scienceAcademic research with therapeutic potential
- 02Fund the evidenceUp to $1.5M per project over 18-24 months
- 03Make the decisionEvaluate further investment and company creation
Program terms announced in October 2023. Company formation is a possible outcome.
02The lawyers who went looking for companies
Jon Flint, Terry McGuire and Steve Arnold founded Polaris in 1996. Flint and McGuire brought experience from Burr, Egan, Deleage & Co.; Flint’s account of his own career describes a move out of litigation and into venture investing. The firm’s origins help explain a portfolio history that stretches across enterprise technology and healthcare.
McGuire’s biography adds a useful distinction: he also co-founded businesses, including Inspire Pharmaceuticals, Advanced Inhalation Research and MicroCHIPS. Investing can mean judging someone else’s plan. Founding makes the missing pieces your problem. Polaris’s pitch rests heavily on that second kind of experience.
Amy Schulman brought another version of it when she joined in 2014. At Pfizer, she had moved from general counsel into running nutrition and consumer-healthcare businesses. She co-founded the Polaris Innovation Fund in 2017. Today her work includes managing-partner responsibilities at Polaris and chairing Alnylam’s board. The combination puts legal, operating and investment experience in the same conversation.
The culture Polaris advertises is personal and involved. On its website, Dewpoint executive Ameet Nathwani says: “They push us to be better.” That is a portfolio-company endorsement, with the relationship that implies. Still, it makes a testable promise: founders should be able to describe what an investor actually did when a problem arrived.
03Three routes in, with different entry requirements
Polaris primarily backs healthcare and biotechnology businesses. Its stated interests include therapeutics, genomics, healthcare delivery and the software and data tools surrounding care. The practical offering is investment capital coupled with company formation, board involvement, strategic advice and introductions. A founder is seeking a long-term financial partner; a hospital or patient generally encounters a portfolio company’s product.
There are distinct routes through the family. The main venture funds back companies. The Innovation Fund concentrates on the commercial potential of early academic research. Polaris Growth Fund, an affiliate launched in 2018, serves established, founder-owned technology businesses. Calling the growth fund Polaris’s parent gets the relationship backward: Polaris describes it as a specialized affiliate.
The growth affiliate publishes a particularly useful filter: B2B software or technology-enabled services, $4 million to $20 million in annual recurring revenue, profitable growth of at least 10 percent, and $15 million to $50 million of equity per investment. It considers majority and minority positions. That makes the fit easier to judge than a vague promise to support great founders.
These businesses need different things. A research project may need an experiment and a development plan. A software company may need stronger sales management, acquisitions or liquidity for its founder. Their common requirement is a partner capable of doing work beyond transferring cash. Their financing should reflect how far each has already travelled.
“They push us to be better.”
Ameet Nathwani · Dewpoint Therapeutics
Portfolio-company testimonial published by Polaris
04The dollars have different jobs
In May 2017, Polaris announced that its eighth fund had closed at $435 million, above a $400 million target. That was money committed to an investment fund. It was neither annual revenue for the management business nor a valuation of Polaris itself. Venture databases become much less useful when those categories are mixed together.
The underlying business model is fund management: investors commit capital, funds acquire stakes, and investment outcomes determine what can eventually be returned. Management fees and a share of investment profits are the conventional economics of venture funds; precise terms belong to individual agreements. Founders face their own price in ownership dilution and negotiated governance rights.
Consider Pandion Therapeutics, a company in Polaris’s investment history. Merck agreed to buy it in February 2021 for $60 a share, an approximate $1.85 billion equity value, and completed the acquisition that April. Pandion was developing treatments for autoimmune diseases. The purchase illustrates how a pharmaceutical buyer can become the next source of development capacity and capital.
A large acquisition price is not the venture firm’s profit. Other shareholders own pieces of the company, and the investor’s purchase price matters. Nor does buying a clinical-stage company establish that its medicines will reach patients. The transaction is a business milestone with a dollar figure attached; clinical progress remains a separate test.
These are different measures, not comparable investment returns.
05Akili found the harder question: who pays?
Akili, another Polaris-backed company, made a striking product: a video game used as a medical treatment. Its EndeavorRx received FDA authorization in 2020. That put a familiar consumer activity inside a clinical framework, but it did not settle the mechanics of selling it.
By September 2023, Akili announced a shift toward a non-prescription business model and a consumer subscription approach. Management pointed to early demand for EndeavorOTC and sought less dependence on payers and other intermediaries. The accompanying restructuring included a roughly 40 percent workforce reduction. This was a change in how the company expected to reach paying users.
The financial pressure was plain. Akili’s 2023 annual report recorded a $59.5 million net loss and a $299.8 million accumulated deficit at year-end. In May 2024, Virtual Therapeutics agreed to acquire it at an approximate $34 million equity value. The acquisition closed in July. Those figures describe Akili’s accounts and transaction, not Polaris’s individual investment loss.
The early commercial model had fallen short despite the regulatory milestone. That is the useful sequence for founders to study. Management’s public rationale identifies consumer demand and reduced reliance on intermediaries as reasons for changing course. It does not establish that Polaris’s partners changed their broader investment thesis.
The lesson is uncomfortable and practical: evidence that a product can help someone and evidence that someone will reliably pay for it answer different questions. A healthcare business needs both. Spending on clinical validation without also testing access, adoption and payment leaves a substantial part of the business unproven.
06Singapore puts the method on a timetable
65LAB’s partner list supplies the missing machinery behind the company-building claim. Evotec contributes drug-discovery and development capabilities; the investment group includes ClavystBio, Leaps by Bayer, Lightstone Ventures and Polaris. Academic partners include A*STAR, the National University of Singapore and Duke-NUS Medical School. No single participant supplies the whole route from discovery to a business.
Even the name does some geographic work: 65 refers to Singapore’s independence year and its international dialling code. More materially, the structure pairs a defined research period with a later investment decision. The budget buys a chance to establish whether there should be a next step. It cannot buy a predetermined scientific result.
The Singapore connection remains visible in newer portfolio news. In August 2026, Cirrus Therapeutics announced a collaboration with the Singapore Eye Research Institute and Duke-NUS, alongside seed financing totalling $14.7 million to date. Polaris features the announcement in its news feed. The financing belongs to Cirrus, and the collaboration is a research-development event, rather than evidence of an approved therapy.
This is also where Polaris fits in a crowded market. It operates among specialist healthcare investors, including ARCH Venture Partners and Flagship Pioneering; company creation itself is not an exclusive invention. Its particular proposition combines longstanding founder relationships, healthcare experience and affiliated vehicles for research and software growth. A prospective founder should compare the relevant partner’s work, not just the firms’ descriptions.
07Borrow the sequence, then ask for references
The most portable idea here is to fund the next consequential question. In the academic setting, that might mean producing evidence strong enough to support company formation. In an operating business, it might mean establishing that a customer will pay without extraordinary sales effort. The milestone should change a decision, not merely make the next presentation look busier.
A founder approaching Polaris can make the conversation more useful by naming the stage, the unresolved risk and the work the proposed capital would buy. An academic team should explain the discovery and its development path. A healthcare software company should distinguish the user from the purchasing decision-maker. An established software founder can compare the growth affiliate’s published criteria with actual revenue and profitability.
Then investigate the relationship. Ask portfolio executives about hiring, missed milestones, follow-on financing and disagreements. A relevant introduction is valuable when it leads to an action. A board member’s operating experience matters when it improves a decision. Reference calls should uncover examples of both, including periods when results were disappointing.
The conditions matter. Research without convincing evidence may never justify a company. A founder seeking to retain every decision may find shared governance frustrating. A business with limited prospects for investment returns may need another form of finance. Polaris’s history offers a useful way to think about building: assemble the resources around the problem, and keep asking whether the next result earns the next dollar.