Dec. 14 Quick Takes: Playground Global raises $410M third fund

Playground Global will bring first-time scientific founders enough capital to de-risk their platform technologies and help them identify best-in-class opportunities with a new fund — the firm’s third. The VC said the $410 million fund will focus on seed and series A companies with initial investments of $1-$20 million. General Partner Jory Bell told BioCentury in October that the firm’s “leitmotif is companies that figure out creative ways to generate data.” Playground launched in 2015 with $300 million and a focus on hardware and software, then raised a $500 million second fund in 2016 of which about 25-30% went toward life sciences companies.

Apple Tree Partners invested $52 million in a seed round for Deep Apple Therapeutics Inc., a San Francisco small molecule discovery company it created and incubated. Deep Apple has a discovery platform that uses cryo-EM, deep learning and molecular docking screens for rapid new lead identification. The technology is well-suited to discover drugs against membrane proteins, and Deep Apple is first working on multiple programs targeting GPCRs. The company’s academic co-founders are Stanford University professor Georgios Skiniotis and University of California San Francisco professors Brian Shoichet and John Irwin. Founding CEO Spiros Liras is an ATP venture partner...