Flagship Pioneering, one of the leading backers of life sciences startups, said Wednesday that it has secured another $618 million in financial commitments from new and longtime investors.
The new venture round — Flagship’s largest one-time infusion ever — boosts to $2.3 billion the total capital raised by the Cambridge firm since its founding in 2000. The money is used to start and fund biotech, medical technology, and bio-agriculture businesses.
After changing its name from Flagship Ventures a year ago, this year it spun out a half dozen companies from an in-house incubator, VentureLabs. Two companies it backed, Denali Therapeutics Inc. and Quanterix Corp., completed initial public offerings of stock this month. Other companies in the Flagship portfolio raised a total of $835 million this year.
Flagship’s founder and chief executive, Noubar Afeyan, said the new capital will help his firm create and fund six to eight new companies a year. He said the startups will work in the fields of “human health and sustainability” to develop novel drugs and other products using new technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence.
“We look for things that will seem reasonable if not obvious a few years from now, but now seem totally unrealistic,” Afeyan said. “That’s our whole methodology.”
The science-intensive firm, which Afeyan said explores between 50 and 100 potential projects a year, currently backs about three dozen companies, including such high-profile names as Moderna Therapeutics Inc. and Seres Therapeutics Inc. It operates about 60,000 square feet of lab space at Flagship and its wholly owned subsidiaries. Flagship has about 75 employees, while another 50 to 75 work at its wholly owned companies, Afeyan said.
Money from institutional investors such as pension funds and university endowments has in recent years been pouring into venture capital firms that fund life sciences.
Other Boston area venture firms, including Third Rock Ventures, Atlas Venture, and Polaris Partners, also have amassed investment pools totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, helping to fuel the region’s booming biomedical sector.
Robert Weisman can be reached at robert.weisman@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeRobW.