The Opportunities Are Endless

Reflections from the AVANT BIO 2026 Annual General Meeting

A wrap-up from our 2026 Annual General Meeting (AGM) - what we heard from portfolio CEOs, capital markets veterans, and the industry leaders building the next generation of life science infrastructure.

On April 23rd, AVANT BIO hosted our 2026 AGM in New York. The day brought together our portfolio companies, strategic investors, special industry guests, operating advisors, and investment bankers. A true cross-section of the ecosystem we've spent years building.

We chose a deliberate theme: The Opportunities Are Endless.

It is, on its face, a bold thing to say after the last two years. The post-COVID life sciences correction was real. Biotech funding tightened, valuations compressed, and capital became disciplined in ways the industry hadn't seen in nearly a decade. For many investors, the last 18 months haven't felt particularly endless in their opportunity.

But that gap between the headline narrative and what we actually see on the ground is precisely why we picked the theme. As Daniella Kranjac, our Founding General Partner, told the room:

"The opportunities are endless. Maybe the last 18 months haven't really felt that way in life sciences, but that's exactly why we selected this topic. We've really prided ourselves on finding those opportunities where others didn't even think to look."

What follows is a synthesis of what came out of the day, the conviction, the case studies, and the patterns we're watching as we look toward 2026 and beyond.

1. Opportunity Through Discipline

Before there can be opportunity, there has to be a position from which to seize it. The first thread running through the AGM was that the companies that used the downturn well are the ones now positioned to win.

Daniella framed it directly:

"2025, when we look back, was a year of true discipline and rigor. We saw our portfolio companies respond in the way that we had hoped. They conserved capital, they focused on revenue-generating activities, they led partnerships, they addressed customer needs, and they positioned themselves for a lot of opportunity going forward."

That positioning is starting to show up in real numbers. Portfolio companies have extended their runways, grown revenue, gained customer traction, and cleared paths to value creation, with portfolio companies delivering >50% revenue growth across the board (>5x industry average).

The capital markets backdrop is reinforcing the same story. Richard Gormley of H.C. Wainwright, who has watched four decades of biotech cycles, joined our "2026 and Beyond" fireside chat and put it plainly:

"Often the best deals happen in the down cycles. And fortunately, we're really at the bottom of the first inning of what will be a very long and productive cycle."

We have also observed a shift in strategy with the largest strategics focusing on deals between $5-15Bn+. That's leaving the more run of the mill, the half-a-billion-dollar acquisition wide open.

Raghav Chadha of Citi, who is at the forefront of life science deals, including the recent Path AI acquisition by Roche, said, "The large strategics are deliberately outsourcing the work of rolling up and scaling companies to "venture capital, growth equity, private equity, they want firms like AVANT BIO to put these businesses together and get them to scale, then the strategics come in to acquire."

The data supports the turn. Biotech companies have raised close to $20Bn in equity year-to-date through April, against $35Bn for all of last year. Roughly 150 deals have priced, and 70% are trading above their issue price, a metric Richard called "incredibly powerful." Pharma is back at the table, with $48Bn of announced M&A so far this year and an estimated $350-400 billion of revenue coming off patent in the next four to five years that the majors must replace.

The capital is there. The buyers are there. What was missing in 2025: direction, conviction, exit visibility, are all returning.

2. Opportunity at the Convergence

The second thread was the one we've been building our thesis around since day one: the convergence of biology, technology, and AI.

Daniella was direct about why this isn't just a buzzword for us:

"From our perspective, every single emerging idea or new therapeutic will rely on the enabling technologies and services that are coming from our AVANT BIO portfolio. The next generation of scientific breakthroughs are absolutely going to come, and they're going to come with the help of AVANT BIO."

Sebastien Latapie, Partner at AVANT BIO, walked the room through the patterns we've observed across the hundreds of founders we meet each year. He pulled out three signals worth paying attention to.

The inputs problem. New therapeutic modalities; cell therapy, gene therapy, personalized medicine, are delivering remarkable results, but the complexity of producing them is compounding faster than the manufacturing stack can keep up. As Seb put it: "With these novel modalities, complexity is compounding." That complexity is creating real opportunities in cell cultures, enzymes, growth factors, DNA synthesis for personalized medicine, and iPSC platforms.

AI's footprint. AI capital is flowing unevenly:

"AI has skewed very heavily towards discovery. In our world, 65% of the companies that we met, AI was a predominant factor in the discovery stage. What this says to us is that the rest of the downstream process is ripe for AI applications in the future."

The underappreciated part is the rest of the value chain: development, manufacturing, QC, and clinical. Discovery got there first for one simple reason - public datasets exist. The opportunity from here is in the parts where data is proprietary, sparse, and harder to collect. That's where we believe the next wave of AI-enabled companies will be built.

Richard Gormley raised the same observation from a capital markets seat, and added a striking framing:

"The fascinating thing about this sector is, with all the promise of AI - having a smarter approach to patient selection, protein selection, whatever it may be, there's not a single dollar of stock market value in life sciences that reflects AI yet."

The market is not pricing in the productivity upside that AI will eventually unlock in life sciences. When the proof points come, the re-rating will be substantial.

Automation escapes the high-throughput lab. Sebastien's third pattern: "Automation is finally escaping the high-throughput lab." Where automated workflows used to require massive scale to justify the engineering investment, new technologies are making automation accessible to smaller labs and more flexible manufacturing sites.

These observations don't sit in isolation. As Sebastien closed:

"New inputs with these new modalities are generating new substrates, and new types of data. AI is consuming new data but also creating proprietary data of its own as it connects the dots. And automation expands the scope of what you can actually do. You're really building this new data layer within the life science ecosystem, and that's enabling new approaches but also new business models."

That data layer is where we think the durable companies of the next decade will be created. And you don't have to take that on faith - our portfolio is already living it.

Intrepid Labs, our AI-driven pharmaceutical formulation company, is a direct example of AI moving past discovery. Founder Christine Allen made the case for why formulation has been overlooked:

"Drug delivery, drug formulation can be a major value driver in drug development, but formulation development historically has been far too slow and too empirical. And we're changing that. Formulation turns molecules into medicines. Formulation determines scalability, manufacturability, delivery, patient experience, and can really set molecules up for success in clinical development."

The proof point: Intrepid reports that its Andromeda algorithm now delivers a 60x efficiency gain over the design-of-experiment software that has been the industry standard for decades. They recently delivered a new formulation to a partner with a phase 1 trial behind them in two weeks, work that would historically have taken months.

PathPresenter, our digital pathology infrastructure company, illustrates one way that new data layers are enabling new approaches. As founder Dr. Raj Singh explained during the "Sustainable Companies in the Age of AI" fireside:

"People are understanding that, yes, AI could be really helpful, but unless I can get the infrastructure right, unless I can get the infrastructure to get this AI into my department, into my pathology lab, into the hospital, I will never be able to use this AI."

There are roughly 8Bn glass pathology slides produced each year, and only about 10% are digital. There's been roughly $1Bn of investment in pathology AI, but pathologists aren't using it, for the simple reason that the underlying infrastructure isn't in place. PathPresenter is building that infrastructure for top U.S. cancer centers and positioning itself as what Raj called "the operating system for pathology."

Abbelight, our super-resolution microscopy company, illustrates another way that new data layers are enabling new approaches in biological imaging. Founder Jean-Baptiste Marie framed the mission this way:

"Our mission is to combine the most advanced tools and protocols into an accessible platform that enables, for the first time in history, the observation of the most complex objects, the structures and the dynamics of biology."

Their platform, built on the Nobel-Prize-winning chemistry of 2014, allows researchers to move "from Google Maps to Google Street View" inside the cell, with applications running from neuroscience to oncology to pharma's drug development pipelines.

3. Opportunity Through Active Stewardship

The third thread was something we've believed from the beginning, and that came through in every portfolio company presentation: writing checks is the easy part. Building companies takes work.

Daniella laid out the philosophy:

"Our active governance style is core to us. We're not just writing a check, we're hand in hand working with the portfolio companies. We're rolling up our sleeves, we're making those introductions for them, we're introducing them to strategics, to distributors, to talent."

What that looks like in practice came through clearly in the case studies.

PL Bioscience, our German human platelet lysate company, is a textbook example. Ole- Henrik Bang Andreasen shared the story of how, when a key manufacturing component disappeared from the global supply chain post-COVID with an 18-month lead time, the AVANT BIO team took action: "We spent some very long days calling around and working our network to make sure these components arrived in Germany to continue manufacturing."

That's the kind of thing that determines whether a company misses a quarter or makes one. PL Bioscience grew revenue, expanded distribution into China and South Korea through partnerships we helped broker and now reports that it is10x-ing manufacturing capacity in Germany.

Abbelight told a similar story from the founder's chair. Jean-Baptiste Marie on what AVANT BIO has meant since closing their round:

"They are really playing as sparring partners. The entrepreneurship background and DNA they have, for me, is like having a second program giant that can help with a sharp critical eye. Ole sends probably 20 ideas and pieces of information per week that we can implement to make better decisions and go faster. That's a huge booster for us."

Intrepid Labs chose AVANT BIO along with high-profile AI-first investors for a specific reason. Christine Allen:

"We wanted a group that really understood drug development, and in particular, the value that drug formulation and drug delivery can unlock. AVANT BIO uniquely understands the value that technologies like our Valiant platform can unlock."

In the year since closing, AVANT BIO introductions have brought Intrepid to CMC and drug development experts, prospective investors, and prospective partners - culminating in deep partnerships with AI programs now running on live clinical projects.

PathPresenter put it in different words, but the substance was the same. Patrick Miles, CEO: "What was really great is the people they introduced us to. We need to stand on the shoulders of others in order to really be successful."

Why "The Opportunities Are Endless"

Step back from the individual stories and the picture comes together.

The macro tailwinds are real and accelerating: $350-400Bn in pharma revenue coming off patent, M&A returning at scale, equity markets reopening, and a long cycle ahead. The technology shift is real: AI is leaving discovery and moving into manufacturing, formulation, pathology, and beyond - where the data is proprietary and the opportunities are largest.

The market is not yet pricing in AI's potential.

Underneath all of it is the deeper truth that drew us to form AVANT BIO. As Christine Allen reminded the room, talking about patients waiting for therapies that may never come:

"We have these tools, and the tools are getting better, and the evidence that these tools work is only improving. We can't not consider using these tools. It's about setting every molecule up for success before it gets into the clinic because many of those drugs don't get a second chance."

The opportunities are endless - for anyone who knows where to look.