A five-year-old biotech startup has expanded into a 142,000-square-foot building in South San Francisco.
InterVenn Biosciences has leased the office and research and development building at 499 Forbes Blvd., San Francisco Business Times reported.
Aralon Properties, based in San Francisco, leased the building for 10 years. Joe Cammarata and Gregg Domanico of Kidder Matthews represented the landlord.
The lease represents a major expansion for InterVenn, which aims for new ways to detect and treat cancer, the company said in an emailed statement to the newspaper. The firm was founded in 2017 in Redwood City, then relocated to the biotech hub of South San Francisco.
It will retain its existing lease for about 20,000 square feet on the fifth floor of 2 Tower Place, an office and lab property just west of Highway 101.
Aralon Properties had entitled the R&D property at 499 Forbes Blvd. in 2020, which was built on spec. The InterVenn lease is “another sign that South San Francisco continues to be a leader in the biotech world,” Principal Tom Murphy said.
South San Francisco, dubbed the “birthplace of biotechnology” is now home to around 200 biotech companies inhabiting 11.5 million square feet. The city expects to add from 50,000 to 90,000 new jobs, mostly in the life sciences sector, in the next 10 years.
InterVenn, a company backed by Softbank, raised $201 million last August in a Series C round. Its CEO, Aldo Carrascoso, told the newspaper he believed the 100-person company could see its workforce more than double in 2023.
The firm had raised $45 million over two funding rounds between 2018 and 2020, and said it would use its Series C capital to introduce its Dawn liquid biopsy assay – a next-generation blood test to help predict how cancer patients might respond to different immunotherapies.
InterVenn plans to move some of its existing operations to 499 Forbes, but did not provide a timeline.
Aralon, whose portfolio is centered in San Francisco and the northern Peninsula, bought the property for close to $10 million in 2018. It includes a four-story parking garage with spaces for 265 cars.
The demand for life science space in South San Francisco is unrelenting. Last month, Dallas-based Trammell Crow was in pending deals to redevelop four properties into a biotech complex east of the 101 Freeway.
[San Francisco Business Times] – Dana Bartholomew
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