The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has partnered with state-owned Shanghai Industrial Investment Holdings (SIIC) to establish a new fund targeting Hong Kong’s biotechnology and life science sector.
The new fund, titled the Hong Kong Biotechnology Fund (HKBF), will be the inaugural venture investment fund under the Redbird Innovation Fund (RIF), a HK$500-million initiative launched by the HKUST in April 2024 to provide anchor investments towards GPs investing into HKUST-born projects, according to a release on Thursday.
With HKUST and SIIC acting as the anchor investors of HKBF, the fund has a target size of HK$600 million ($77.2 million). Half of the fund will be dedicated to HKUST-associated ventures that could span from startups founded by HKUST members, ventures utilising HKUST technologies or incubated within HKUST’s facilities.
SIIC Capital, the wholly-owned fund management and investment platform of SIIC, will manage the HKBF. The firm said t has identified a pipeline of opportunities across various biomedical sectors, such as neurodegeneration, ophthalmic drug delivery system, and gene therapy.
SIIC Capital is currently looking to rope in external LPs to expand its fund size as the fund progresses, the release said.
“With the launch of the HKBF, SIIC Capital will leverage its industrial ecosystem capabilities and Shanghai-Hong Kong synergies to target early-stage biotech R&D translation,” said Hong Kong Biotechnology Fund president May Liang.
The new biotech fund comes at a time when Hong Kong public universities are increasingly setting up private market funds to back startups founded by their students, staff, and alumni, a sign that they are inching closer to the university endowment model that major universities across the US and China are undertaking. But for now, the priority for the city’s universities would be growing the local ecosystem, especially in the area of deep tech.
Meanwhile, the Hong Kong SAR government is also ramping up its startup support via Research, Academic and Industry Sectors One‑plus Scheme (RAISe+) and Technology Start-up Support Scheme for Universities (TSSSU), among others.
These initiatives aim to address some of the challenges hindering the city’s innovation and technology development including how university policies have failed to encourage the academia in commercialising researches, the lack of R&D talents, and limited university-industry collaboration, according to a government report published in 2022.
