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Vivo Ventures’ Time Arrives As All Eyes Look To China

Funded initially in 1996 by private and government sources in Taiwan, Vivo Ventures has emerged as a leader among US-based VCs investing in China. The firm’s partners say its success will come through an intricate web of business development and licensing arrangements between health care companies in China with their counterparts in the US. The strategy has produced results. In the US, specialty pharmaceutical company Sagent Pharmaceuticals went public last year after building a booming business at least partially upon arrangements with China suppliers. In China, Medtronic stepped up in October to acquire Kanghui Medical, an orthopedics company with global vision and connections to privately held US companies.

If one had taken a group photo of the leading life sciences VCs in the late 1990s, you might have found Vivo Ventures standing in the back row, its face partially obscured by a waving hand or a large head. Known then as BioAsia, Vivo Ventures walked the same hallways and sat in the same board rooms as the big firms on Silicon Valley’s campus. But the firm always stood apart as a Silicon Valley firm with unknown Asian backers looking to invest in US life science companies. No one quite knew whether Vivo functioned as a true venture capital firm, a business development program, or just an overseas financial adventure of wealthy investors from abroad. The firm nevertheless trudged along, building a healthy portfolio of US biopharmaceutical and device companies.

Gather that same group today and Vivo Ventures would be easy to find, perhaps even standing front and center. The same qualities that once made the Palo Alto-based firm a...

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