A virtual Who’s Who of biopharma hedge funds have stakes in a recent merger deal involving a blank-check company sponsored by a major life sciences hedge fund.
Perceptive Capital Solutions Corp., a special purpose acquisition company backed by an affiliate of Joseph Edelman’s Perceptive Advisors, agreed to merge with Freenome Holdings, a privately held early cancer-detection company developing blood-based screening tests.
The merger is expected to be completed in the first half of 2026, and the company will be renamed Freenome Inc. The deal includes commitments for a $240 million private investment in public equity from a group of investors led by Perceptive and RA Capital Management, with participation from investors including hedge funds ADAR1 Capital and Farallon Capital Management, venture capital giant Bain Capital Life Sciences, and other new and existing unnamed health care investors, according to a press release.
Perceptive Capital Solutions went public in June 2024 at the usual SPAC IPO price of $10 per share. Its shares closed Friday at $12.21 per share.
That same day, RA Capital disclosed in a regulatory filing that it owns 750,000 shares of Perceptive Capital Solutions, or 8.4 percent of the total outstanding. This includes 5,255,376 shares of new Freenome common stock in the PIPE financing. After the merger’s close, and including the shares acquired in the PIPE, RA Capital expects to own about 13 percent of the outstanding new Freenome common stock, according to the filing.
No other PIPE participant has so far filed disclosures about its stake in the SPAC.
Perceptive and RA Capital, as well as others, are no strangers to Freenome. Over the years, they have been prominent investors in the fledgling biopharma company, leading and/or participating in several financings.
In February 2024, Freenome raised $254 million in its Series E financing round from a slew of investors, including Perceptive, RA Capital, and hedge fund Cormorant Capital. In December 2021, it raised $300 million in a Series D funding led by Perceptive and RA Capital, with a number of other investors, including hedge funds Catalio Capital Management, Cormorant, Farallon, Rock Springs Capital, and Soleus Capital Management.
In August 2020, Freenome announced a $270 million Series C financing led by Bain Capital Life Sciences and existing investor Perceptive Advisors. They were joined by several other new investors at the time, including Janus Henderson Investors, Farallon, Rock Springs, Cormorant, EcoR1 Capital, Catalio Capital, RA Capital, and accounts advised by Soleus Capital.
And in 2019, RA Capital co-led Freenome’s $160 million Series B financing.
