Sahir Raoof has raised $27.5 million for his first solo venture capital fund, a debut that arrives as first-time fund managers face one of the toughest fundraising climates in years. His firm, Proximal Ventures, is betting that artificial intelligence can reshape the tools, infrastructure and services that drug developers depend on.
What does Proximal Ventures invest in?
Raoof is a former SignalFire investor and an executive at two healthcare startups. Proximal plans to invest in pre-seed and seed-stage companies, writing checks between $500,000 and $1.5 million.
Drug development has long been a team sport with outside players. Pharmaceutical companies have historically handed off different stages of the process to specialized service providers, whether that means synthesizing thousands of molecular compounds, figuring out how to manufacture drugs at scale or analyzing clinical trial data.
Why are investors betting on AI for drug development services?
Raoof sees the model as the opening. “For a long time, the assumption was that pharma is not a great buyer of software, but a really good buyer of services,” he told TechCrunch. AI could automate much of that work, allowing startups to deliver the same services at a lower cost and in significantly less time. That, he said, creates a chance for new companies to capture billions of dollars in pharmaceutical industry spending.
He points to law and finance as examples. Some of the most valuable applications of AI so far have come in those service-oriented industries, and he believes pharmaceutical services can follow a similar path.
Proximal has already backed seven startups. One of them, ChronicleBio, was co-founded by former OpenAI executive Fidji Simo. The company uses AI to analyze biological and medical data, with the goal of better understanding chronic diseases and identifying potential treatments.
Raoof's background is on the commercial side of life sciences. Before spending two years as a principal at SignalFire, he led business development at Iterative Health, a clinical trial recruitment startup. Earlier, he oversaw partnerships at Flatiron Health, an oncology data company that Roche acquired for $1.9 billion in 2018.
That experience matters, Raoof said, because selling into life sciences is hard. “If you’re building a company that’s selling into the life sciences, one of the hardest things to do is starting that initial commercial flywheel,” he said.
Proximal’s backers include the venture firms SignalFire and Kleiner Perkins, Bertelsmann Healthcare Investments, and individual investors such as Dimension Capital co-founders Nan Li and Zavain Dar. Limited partners, the investors who put money into VC funds, were persuaded by Raoof’s sales background, his understanding of the healthcare ecosystem and his industry relationships. Those strengths gave them confidence that he could spot strong startups and help them land customers.
Amy Abernethy, co-founder of Highlander Health and a former principal deputy commissioner of the FDA, is also an investor. She first met Raoof when they worked together at Flatiron Health, where she served as chief medical officer. She told TechCrunch that his ability to build relationships and spot industry bottlenecks made a lasting impression, and she is confident those abilities, combined with his grasp of what the healthcare market needs, will make him a successful investor.
Those qualities, she added, have helped Proximal invest in startups alongside some of the better-known and much larger funds.
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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