Spain’s largest life sciences VC is moving upstream with InceptionBio, its first fund dedicated to the riskiest stage of biotech: company creation from university and research centre spinouts. CDTI is an anchor LP. The target is at least three new companies in 2026.
The hardest part of turning academic science into a biotech company is not raising the Series A.
It is the period before the Series A exists, when a promising laboratory discovery needs to be converted into a legal entity, given a founding team, and provided with just enough capital to generate the preclinical data that will make institutional investors take the call.
Most European life sciences funds avoid this stage. It is slow, expensive, and the failure rate is punishing. Ysios Capital has decided to lean into it.
The Barcelona and San Sebastián-based firm, Spain’s largest life sciences venture capital manager with more than €400 million in assets under management, has launched InceptionBio: a €100 million fund dedicated exclusively to biotech company creation and early-stage investment, with a particular focus on Spanish scientific institutions.
The fund has already secured a partial first close, with Spain’s Centre for Technological Development and Innovation (CDTI) participating as an anchor investor. The vehicle aims to establish at least three new companies in 2026.
InceptionBio will be led by Joan Perelló, who joined Ysios as a Venture Partner in 2022 and has now been appointed Managing Partner, and Arturo Urrios, who joins as Partner from a background spanning Wellington Partners, M Ventures, Merck’s corporate venture arm, and the founding team of Seamless Therapeutics.
Perelló brings operational weight: he co-founded Sanifit, a Palma-based renal disease biotech that raised over €140 million in equity before being acquired by Vifor Pharma for €375 million.
His background is in chemistry and analytical chemistry, and he has previously served as CEO, president, or chairman of several biotech and medtech companies across Spain and France.
The fund’s investment model is focused on technology transfer: working directly with universities, hospitals, and research centres to identify discoveries with therapeutic potential that are ready to be incorporated, and providing the capital and operational support to build companies around them.
This is the pre-seed and seed stage of biotech, where the primary output is not a financial return but a pipeline-ready company that Ysios’s later-stage funds or external investors can take forward.
The approach complements Ysios’s existing BioFund III, its €216 million flagship vehicle launched in 2020, and its Telescope Biotech Fund, an Andbank-managed public equities vehicle focused on listed biotech that returned 52.5% net in its first year.
Ysios was founded in 2008 and has backed more than 40 biotech companies over its history, including Stat-Diagnostica (acquired by Qiagen), SpliceBio, Ona Therapeutics, and Minoryx Therapeutics.
Joël Jean-Mairet remains as Managing Partner of the firm’s main funds. The launch of InceptionBio marks the first time Ysios has specifically structured a €100 million vehicle around the company creation stage, a gap in Spain’s life sciences funding landscape that the firm has identified as both a strategic opportunity and a structural necessity if the country’s research output is to translate into durable commercial entities rather than licensing deals or early exits.
