Tishman Speyer JV Closes $3B Life Science Fund

Rendering of The 105 in Boston. Image courtesy of Breakthrough Properties

Breakthrough Properties has reached the final closings for its Breakthrough Life Science Property Fund, which raised $3 billion in direct capital and co-investments.

A joint venture of Tishman Speyer and Bellco Capital, Breakthrough will use the fund “to scale a global portfolio of best-in-class ecosystems for dynamic early-, mid-, and late-stage life science companies.”

The $3 billion in fund and co-investment capital massively surpassed Breakthrough’s initial $1.5 billion target. The fund is the largest real estate fund dedicated exclusively to the life science sector, excluding recapitalizations of existing portfolios, according to Breakthrough, citing CBRE and JLL Research.

It reportedly was raised from a diverse group of institutional investors, sovereign wealth funds and high-net-worth individuals across four continents.

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Breakthrough was formed in 2019 as a joint venture between Tishman Speyer and biotechnology investment firm Bellco Capital and has already amassed 4.6 million square feet of projects in the pipeline across San Diego, Boston/Cambridge, Philadelphia, Amsterdam, as well as Oxford and Cambridge in the U.K.

Breakthrough will use the newly raised funds to finance its ongoing developments, consisting of a mix of ground-up campus developments, lab conversions and StudioLabs, the company’s proprietary flex lab program geared toward hyper-growth start-ups.

Tishman Speyer CEO and Breakthrough Co-Chairman Rob Speyer commented that there is an acute and accelerating need for well-located, cutting-edge lab space and that the new fund enables the company to deliver more such projects across the U.S. and Europe.

Speed of life

The venture’s portfolio includes The 105 by Breakthrough, at 105 W. First St. in Boston, which is fully preleased to CRISPR Therapeutics and will open later this year.

In 2021, Breakthrough broke ground on its 515,000-square-foot Torrey View by Breakthrough development, a 10-acre R&D campus in San Diego, where the biosciences arm of global medical technology company BD (Becton, Dickinson and Co.) signed a major prelease.

The U.S. life science industry is thriving, with venture capital pouring at an historic clip into companies at all stages of growth, even as National Institutes of Health funding is expected to rise, according to a first-quarter report from Colliers. The Boston and San Francisco metro areas lead the U.S. in attracting VC deals, garnering almost 60 percent of them.

In its 2022 Global Investor Outlook Report, Colliers notes that “life science was the most popular alternative or specialized asset class for the second year running.”