Dementia Discovery Fund

Angus Grant serves as CEO and leads the investment team, supported by Chief Scientific Officer Tetsu Maruyama. Grant joined in 2021 from a career spanning executive R&D roles at Roche and Celgene. The fund's Investment Committee draws on scientific advisory input from the neuroscience divisions of its pharmaceutical limited partners.

The Dementia Discovery Fund makes direct equity investments in early-stage biotech and neuroscience companies. It does not operate as a fund-of-funds. Its capital is deployed as lead or co-lead in seed and Series A rounds, with reserves for follow-on investments as programs advance toward clinical proof-of-concept.

The seven pharma LPs — Biogen, Eli Lilly, GSK, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Takeda, and Lundbeck — are passive investors in the fund. They do not control investment decisions, but they provide scientific advisory support and represent potential acquirers or licensing partners for portfolio companies. This creates an information advantage without constraining the fund's independent fiduciary duty.

The fund does not invest outside neurodegenerative disease. It explicitly excludes general CNS indications, oncology, cardiovascular, and platform technologies not directly tied to a dementia therapeutic hypothesis. Within dementia, it avoids pure symptomatic treatments without a disease-modifying mechanism.

The Dementia Discovery Fund does co-invest alongside generalist life-science VCs and corporate venture arms. Portfolio company Cerevance, for example, has raised from GV, F-Prime Capital, and the Dementia Discovery Fund in syndicated rounds. The fund's co-investment terms are standard venture-market practice, without preferential rights reserved for its pharma LPs.