SECBIOholdings is an affiliate of SECURITAS FINVEST Investimentos Ltda, founded by Luis Claudio Garcia de Souza, that since 2000, built various innovative financial services companies, mostly with a real estate focus, all of which have been duly divested.
One of Brazil’s first digital mortgage brokers & home equity lenders that was sold to Loft.
Brazil’s first surety company that brought risk enhancement solutions to construction projects such as performance and completion bonds and was sold to Swiss Re
Brazil’s largest REIT manager sold to China’s Fosun
(formerly called RIO BRAVO Crédito), Brazil’s largest
issuer of MBS that was sold to Japan’s Orix Group
• FINVEST Specialty Finance (now Captalys/ IdTrust ), a leading structurer of asset-backed securities and credit funds (FDICs), sold to Polígono and Reag
• Augme Gestora de Recursos, a specialist credit funds manager sold to XP.
• cartão Unik/ Medcheque, acquired from Sodexho that Brazil’s leading PBM’s (Pharmacy Benefits Manager), with a payroll linked credit card that was sold to Wex Inc.
• Vitta Tecnologia em Saúde, a health insurance broker and was sold to Stone, a large fintech company
• Mevo, an electronic prescriptions provider, sold back to the founders
In 2021, this line of business was discontinued.
SECURITAS BIOholdings SA (“SECBIOholdings”) was established in 2012, when SECURITAS FINVEST decided to diversify its business to enter into into more technology-oriented investments. Accordingly SECBIOholdings acquired a relevant stake in Brazilian VC/PE fund manager, FINHEALTH Gestora de Recursos Ltda, that had launched the first and largest local fund dedicated to “filling the gaps” of Brazilian Healthcare, investing in companies beyond seed stage with checks usually larger than those of local VC funds normally focused only in pre-seed and seed.
Also, unlike most of the other local VC funds investing in health, FINHEALTH fund’s LPs include large institutional investors like big pharmas Pfizer and Thermo Fisher, Latam official banks like the IDB, CAF and BNDES, government development agencies like FINEP and institutional investors such as Funcef.
Furthermore, through FINHEALTH, SECBIOholdings was able assemble a highly specialized Life Sciences investment team that created an impressive portfolio of companies in medical services (Hospital PLACI – Laboratório MENDELICS) and medical devices (LIFEMED – TIMPEL).
FinHealth’s VC fund is currently in divestment mode.
Through its FinhHealth experience, SECBIOholdings was able to recognize the shortcomings of the Brazilian biotech eco-system that, despite the high-quality of its science and very competitive costs, lacks adequate private funding for stages beyond seed and has a very small local M&A market for exits.
As such, SECBIOholdings decided to look for a more appropriate biotech eco-system and thus decided to found a Boston-based biotech company - not a fund – called SECURITAS BIOsciences to operate in a "venture studio" model and work with both Latam-based scientists as well as American scientists. This approach involves deploying its own capital into projects validated and meticulously shepherded by SECURITAS BIO's scientific team, thereby minimizing the inherent risks associated with startups. By fostering their development internally until they achieve significant de-risking milestones, such as clinical trials, these ventures are then able to attract more capital and/or potential buyers.
SECURITAS BIO began its journey in Boston with the creation of Virtech Bio, a company originated from a concept developed by a Brazilian transplant surgeon from the University of Pittsburgh, dealing with organ preservation and regeneration which also led to the development of the most advanced human-derived HBOC platform for hemorrhagic shock when blood is not an option. And thus began SECURITAS BIO’s.
Realising that Argentina is a top scientific hub presenting relevant cost advantages to the US while being severely under-funded, SECURITAS BIO decided to significantly expand its research operations into Argentina and established a team of 18 scientists comprising doctors, biologists, physicists, immunologists and others.
Collaborative partnerships with prestigious institutions such as Hospital Italiano and Instituto Leloir now form the cornerstone of SECURITAS BIO's Advanced Therapies Platform that focuses on developing anti-viral vaccines and oncolytic virus treatments, leveraging advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and in silico modelling.
Over the past decade, SECURITAS BIO has invested approximately $25 million, spawning six project companies under its two platforms:
Additionally, SECURITAS BIO has made opportunistic investments in four more advanced-stage companies that align with its strategic focus. They are:
All of SECURITAS BIO‘s companies are incorporated in Delaware whereas some of its personnel may reside in countries such as Argentina. This affords SECURITAS BIO an enormous cost advantage as compared to an all Boston-based operation, without any significant loss of quality, while keeping its closeness to the world’s most developed biotech eco-system.
More recently SECBIOholdings founded Bravo AgBio Ltda to build agro-related biotechnology projects in Brazil and Argentina and also partnered with Radsquare on an AI-powered thermography Brazil-wide project.
For these ventures, SECBIOholdings intends to make extensive use of resources provided by Brazilian and LATAM Development Financial Institutions (DFIs) and Development Agencies, such as the ones that invest in FinHealth’s fund (IDB, BNDES, CAF, FINEP, Desenvolve SP, Ag-Rio,…), in order to complement local private seed capital usually insufficient.
These facilities are only available to Brazil incorporated companies and, as such, these initiatives will have to be formally integrated into SECURITAS BIO, a non-Brazilian entity, at a later stage.
In 2023, leveraging sister company AUREA Finvest’s relevant real estate presence, FINVEST signed a cooperation agreement with MIT’s Center for Real Estate that led to the creation of MIT FINVEST Climate and Real Estate Research Fund which allowed it to become an active CLIMATE TECH player in REAL ESTATE, a sector that accounts for over 40% of carbon emissions worldwide. As such, SECBIOholdings agreed to advise Ahead Ventures, a Banco Fator company, on a decarbonization corporate VC fund that they launched.
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