By
Temitope Olatunji
February 13th, 2024
The ultimate vision driving the billionaire investor Peter Thiel to support the Atai projects is unclear as none of the drugs being independently developed by ATAI has been approved by any regulatory body to date.
ATAI Life Sciences, a Berlin-based biotechnology company focused on mental health solutions has announced the completion of its Series C funding round co-led by Billionaire investor Peter Thiel. According to the official announcement, $125 million was raised in the Series C funding round and it involves $32 million of Atai’s 2020 convertible debt that was converted in connection with the Series C.
“ATAI’s great virtue is to take mental illness as seriously as we should have been taking all illness all along,” Thiel, who co-founded Palantir and PayPal, said in a statement shared with CNBC. “The company’s most valuable asset is its sense of urgency.”
The core principle of ATAI is to support the development of psychedelic drugs that finds wide value for the treatment of psychiatric disorders as well as depression. Atai believes that the current approach to the treatment of mental disorders is not yielding fruits even as seen in the current COVID-19 pandemic.
“With COVID-19 only accentuating the failures of existing standards of care, we are at an inflection point when it comes to seriously addressing this global mental health crisis,” said Christian Angermayer, Founder of ATAI. “I’m excited to continue my support of ATAI alongside an impressive group of investors. I’m proud of the best-in-class technology, tools and top-tier talent that has been established at ATAI to developing promising therapeutics to treat mental health disorders. ATAI’s progress to date has been astounding, and I’m thrilled at what is yet to come.”
One of the novel ways ATAI is adopting to drive its mission is by backing existing firms that are making headway in the line of producing treatment regimens for psychiatric or mental disorders. Based on this, ATAI has subsidiaries including COMPASS Pathways PLC (NASDAQ: CMPS), a firm working on psilocybin, a drug that has the potentials to help unlock the trauma behind a mental health condition so as to be able to develop therapies around it.
Billionaire Peter Thiel Backing ATAI: Possibility of a Success Story?
The ultimate vision driving the billionaire investor Peter Thiel to support the Atai projects is unclear as none of the drugs being independently developed or worked by either one of the 10 subsidiaries of ATAI has been approved by any regulatory body to date.
The possibility of a boom is there though as ATAI hopes to use the new funds to drive “will be used primarily to fund pre-clinical and clinical development of ATAI’s existing mental health programs, to expand its drug candidate pipeline, and further advance ATAI’s platform technologies.”
Besides the planned use of the proceeds gotten from the billionaire investor Peter Thiel and others, ATAI hopes to take the company public to complement the public listing of its Compass Pathway subsidiary. It hopes to make its public debut at a valuation of $2 billion.
If Peter Thiel’s previous investment portfolio ranging from Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB) to PayPal Holdings Inc (NASDAQ: PYPL) is to be considered, the hope for organic growth for Atai can be anticipated.
