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Roivant Sciences, a biopharmaceutical & healthcare technology company, has announced that it is going public via SPAC. The biopharmaceutical and healthcare technology company, and Montes Archimedes Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: MAAC), a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by Patient Square Capital, have entered into a definitive business combination agreement. The deal will value the company at $7.3B.

According to the company, on completion of this deal, outstanding shares and warrants of MAAC will be exchanged for newly issued shares and warrants of Roivant Sciences, which is expected to be listed on Nasdaq under the new ticker symbol “ROIV.”

Roivant will continue to operate under its current management team led by Chief Executive Officer Matthew Gline, while its founder Vivek Ramaswamy will continue to serve as Executive Chairman.

Speaking on the development, Gline says, “I look forward to the next chapter of Roivant’s growth by beginning our life as a public company with an exceptionally strong and diverse base of long-term investors. We look forward to continuing to deliver important medicines to patients through our development engine and our rapidly growing drug discovery capabilities spanning multiple therapeutic areas and modalities.”

Transaction overview

The transaction is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2021, and the shares in Roivant are expected to trade on Nasdaq under a news ticker symbol “ROIV”.

According to a statement, the development will provide Roivant Sciences with a fresh cash capital of $611M for drug development activities and push up the company’s net cash availability to $2.3B.

Investors

This transaction includes $411M in trust at MAAC and a fully committed $200M public financing (“PIPE”) from healthcare investors, including Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC; Eventide Asset Management; Suvretta Capital; RTW Investments; LP; Viking Global Investors; and, SB Management – a subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp.

In addition, strategic investors including Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma and Palantir Technologies will also participate in this transaction. The funding is expected to extend the company’s operating runway through mid-2024.

About Patient Square Capital

In the current development, Patient Square and key Roivant equity holders and management have agreed to long-term lockups, with at least 50 per cent of their holdings locked up for three years.

In addition, the firm has also agreed to convert an additional 30 per cent of its shares of MAAC to earn-out shares, while 20 per cent of its shares will vest at $15 per share and 10 per cent will vest at $20 per share – for 20 of 30 trading days within five years of closing.

Patient Square Capital is a healthcare investment firm that partners with management teams whose products, services, and technologies improve health. The firm utilises its industry expertise, network, and partnership approach to make investments in companies that show growth.

Jim Momtazee, Managing Partner of Patient Square Capital, will join Roivant’s board of directors. Prior to founding Patient Square, Momtazee was a 21-year veteran of KKR, where he helped form its health care investment team 20 years ago and ran that team for over a decade.

Momtazee says, “Roivant is at the cutting edge of using technology to discover and develop transformative medicines for a wide range of serious diseases, and in a very short time, they have established a remarkable track record of building subsidiaries that have run successful registrational clinical trials for approved medicines. I first met the company in 2015 and have watched its growth over the last six years with admiration.”

Improving the delivery of healthcare

Founded in 2014 by Vivek Ramaswamy, Roivant Sciences is a biopharmaceutical company focused on completing the development of promising late-stage drug candidates. It aims to reduce the time and cost of developing new medicines for patients and to share those savings with the healthcare system. 

The company does this by building Vants – nimble, entrepreneurial biotech and healthcare technology companies, with an approach to sourcing talent, aligning incentives, and deploying the technology. In addition, Roivant also builds technology-focused Vants focused on improving the process of developing and commercialising medicines.

Earlier in February 2021, Roivant Sciences acquired Silicon Therapeutics for $450M in Roivant equity, with additional potential regulatory and commercial milestone payments. The acquisition’s aim was to integrate Silicon Therapeutics and Roivant’s VantAI to capture the power of both computational physics and machine learning-based approaches to drug design.

Since its inception, Roivant has developed over 40 medicines across a range of disease areas. Companies built by Roivant have conducted eight consecutive positive Phase 3 studies with two FDA approvals to date. The company is also a leader in computational drug discovery through its combination of computational physics and machine learning-based platforms for the “in silico design” of small molecules. Currently, it has over 800 employees across its family of companies.