"This financing round is an important milestone that contributes to our further global expansion as an individualized cancer company," highlights Ugur Sahin, founder and CEO of BioNTech, about the Series A financing round completed in January. The Mainz-based company raised a total of 225 million euros (270 million US dollars) from new and existing investors. Already in the year of BioNTech's foundation (2008) and only two years after the BMBF's GO-Bio funding, Sahin was able to conclude a seed financing of 150 million euros by strategic investors. "Our investors share our passion to improve the treatment of cancer and other diseases through precise, individual immunotherapies," says Sahin.

The Series A round was led by the Redmile Group and accompanied by Janus Henderson Investors, Invus, Fidelity Management & Research Company and several European family offices. With their Family Office, the Strüngmann brothers will continue to be majority shareholders of BioNTech. They provided 60 million euros for the current round. The newly raised capital will be used to further develop the clinical pipeline of individualized immunotherapies - including mRNA and CAR-T/T cell receptors - for the treatment of cancer and other diseases.

According to data published in the biotech news magazine transkript, this is by far the largest single financing round for a German biotech company. In autumn 2015, the Tübingen-based company Curevac was able to raise 100 million euros from venture capitalists (and increase the amount of the series E round by 26.5 million euros one year later). BioNTech has thus catapulted itself into the top level of German biotech companies. With an estimated valuation of EUR 2 billion to EUR 2.5 billion, it is within the range of the listed companies Evotec and MorphoSys.