Alantra advises TARA Biosystems on sale to Valo Health

Mar 2022

Sell-side advisory

New York – Alantra, a leading global investment bank and asset management firm, is pleased to announce that it has advised TARA Biosystems, an innovative stem cell biology and tissue engineering company, on its sale to Valo Health. The transaction closed on March 31, 2022, and the transaction terms were not disclosed.

New York-based TARA Biosystems is a rapidly growing life science company developing tissue models and cardiac data analytics for drug discovery and development applications. The company engineers mature, functioning human heart tissue in the lab to facilitate decisive evaluation of the efficacy and risk of novel medicines. TARA was backed by OMX Ventures, Mérieux Equity Partners SAS, Alexandria Venture, Empire State Development Fund and LifeForce Capital.

Valo Health is a technology company built to transform the drug discovery and development process using human-centric data and artificial intelligence driven computation. As a digitally native company, Valo aims to fully integrate human-centric data across the entire drug development life cycle into a single unified architecture, thereby accelerating the discovery and development of life-changing drugs while simultaneously reducing costs, time, and failure rates. The company was founded by Flagship Pioneering and is headquartered in Boston, MA.

“TARA’s proprietary ability to model human cardiac disease enables Valo to advance the discovery of new medicines for cardiovascular disease, ushering in a new era for patients,” said Misti Ushio, founder and CEO of TARA. “TARA joining the Valo family is a natural extension of our pre-existing business relationship and is a unique fit given our shared vision of leveraging machine learning and human-centric data to transform the treatment of cardiovascular diseases.”

“Misti, TARA’s CEO, has built a terrific company on the back of a unique technology,” said Rusty Ray, Managing Partner with Alantra. “We are extremely pleased to have been part of such a unique transaction, especially one that we see driving the future of drug discovery and development.  Combining TARA and Valo truly accentuates the possibilities which lie ahead in fusing machine learning and biology.”

Alantra acted as sole financial advisor to TARA Biosystems on this transaction. The Alantra US Healthcare team advising TARA included Mr. Ray, Christian Carlson, PhD. (Director), Darius Kuddo (Analyst), and Michaela Zhang (Analyst).