Resilience, Rasputin & Rasmussan

National Resilience, Inc. as a part of the ARCH Ventures Partners, founded November 23, 2020.

Robert Nelsen, the top biotech investor on our annual Midas List of the best venture capitalists, figures there’s got to be a better way. As numerous companies started developing Covid-19 vaccines last spring, he was worried that they wouldn’t get manufactured fast enough. That meant there would be lots of avoidable deaths, which made him angry (his Twitter bio ends “F—k Covid-19”). And when Bob Nelsen gets mad, he starts a new company. That firm, National Resilience officially, or just “Resilience,” as it’s known, came out of stealth in November with $800 million in funding from Nelsen’s Arch Venture Partners and a who’s who of top-drawer VC firms and pharmaceutical companies.

Nelsen first broached the idea of building a next-gen biotech manufacturing company with Yang at a February 2020 board meeting of Sana Biotechnology, the cell and gene therapy specialist that is another of Nelsen’s companies. Pat Yang, who had worked in operations at Merck and Genentech before becoming executive vice president at Roche, where he oversaw 21 sites and some 15,000 employees, signed on immediately.

Pat Yang quickly brought on Singhvi, a 56-year-old engineer with whom he’d worked at Merck. Singhvi grew up in a family of doctors in Jaipur, India, before getting a doctorate in chemical engineering at MIT. At Merck, he focused on vaccine manufacturing, the least sexy part of the industry at a time. “It was the backwater of the pharma industry,” he says. “Nobody paid attention to vaccines, but manufacturing was important there because it’s a low-margin business. It’s the one part of the pharmaceutical business where manufacturing matters.”

https://resilience.com/
https://resilience.com/meet/team/
https://resilience.com/learn/see-our-sites/
https://www.anl.gov/chicago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argonne_National_Laboratory
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/story/2022-06-08/la-jolla-based-national-resilience-lands-625-million-for-next-generation-biomanufacturing
https://www.fiercepharma.com/manufacturing/manufacturer-national-resilience-helmed-by-former-novavax-chief-snags-sanofi
https://polsky.uchicago.edu/2020/12/04/new-biopharma-manufacturing-company-founded-by-booth-alum-robert-nelsen-raises-800-million/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Rasputin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Rasmussen_(cyclist)