When Sera Medicines licences and develops cutting-edge cancer therapies, it relies on the security and efficiency of an Ideals data room

Overview

William Bonificio is co-founder and Chief Business Officer at Sera Medicines. This American biologics-focused accelerator licenses next-generation protein therapeutics and launches new companies to develop them.

Over the years, William had been invited to use various data rooms to run due diligence and communicate with investors. He first encountered Ideals in 2020 and describes it as “a revelation.”

“It was just so easy to navigate, and I thought: this is a great data room,” says William. His companies now use Ideals to manage the drug development lifecycle, from due diligence through to R&D.

“Ideals is by far the best data room that I’ve used and I’ve managed, and also the best price,” he says.

The context

William is an experienced entrepreneur and investor whose resume includes drug development, investor relations, and corporate operations. Before setting up Sera Medicines, he co-founded several other companies, including ValenzaBio, where he helped successfully in-license three antibody programs, as a result of which the company was acquired by ACELYRIN, Inc. in 2023.

Through his career William had used several data room providers to manage deal and fundraising processes, but he says: “They were all crazy expensive and really cumbersome.”

Then, at ValenzaBio, while doing due diligence on another company’s assets, he used Ideals for the first time. “It was awesome,” he says. “So when the time came for us to set up our own data room, Ideals was the obvious choice.”

Key challenges

Sera Medicines operates in the highly-regulated life sciences industry, so William and the team rely on Ideal to ensure confidentiality at all stages of the drug development lifecycle.

While they primarily use their Ideals VDR when carrying out due diligence on target assets, they also use data rooms for managing drug R&D, investor communications, and when recruiting specialist teams to join their new companies.

“We’re communicating sensitive data that is very proprietary,” explains William. “It’s critical that we have a platform that guarantees us security, but is also easy to use.”

His teams requirements were:

• State-of-the-art security protocols
• A transparent pricing plan
• The facility to run multiple data rooms simultaneously
• Fast data uploads
• Real-time tracking of activity
• Easy access to documents for multiple teams

But it was the security aspect that was the most crucial: “In biopharma, even your correspondence with the FDA is super sensitive because the regulators are so powerful, and it’s information you wouldn’t want your competitors to know.”

Solution

Sera Medicines initially set up two new companies using Ideals. “One was a reverse merger, and we used Ideals throughout the process,” Bill explains. “It was a pretty rigorous diligence process, but it went smoothly.” 

Using Ideals, the team could:

• Set up new data rooms quickly and easily
• Allocate roles for different users within groups and set different permission levels
• Add additional security features such as encryption and watermarks
• Run regular granular reports for monitoring and regulatory purposes
• Access excellent customer support 24/7

“Ideals is just a better product: front end, back end, all of it,” said Bill. “I think it’s by far the best data room I’ve ever used.”

The future

Sera Medicines has financed two companies in the past year and has several more life science startups in the pipeline. “All of these companies will use Ideals for sure,” says Bill. “It’s a fantastic product.”

“We’re always developing new companies, whether for fundraising or licensing, and Ideals makes it incredibly easy and seamless to do that kind of thing. I’d recommend it to anyone working in biopharma.”