from angel investment to nasdaq

Savara Pharmaceuticals

Sector
Biotechnology / Specialty Pharma
headquarters
Austin, Texas, USA
Stage
Series B - 2012
$3M
Keiretsu-led Series B investment
$10M
Approx, cumulative
NASDAQ
Listed via reverse merger in 2017 (SVRA)

Keiretsu Forum anchored Savara’s $8M Series B with a $3M investment led by members across multiple chapters, supporting the company through clinical development and follow-on rounds.

From early-stage angel backing to a Nasdaq listing in 2017

Savara Pharmaceuticals team advancing its specialty pharma pipeline

01

The company

Savara Pharmaceuticals, an Austin-based specialty pharma company developing inhaled therapies for serious pulmonary conditions (its lead program, AeroVanc, targets MRSA lung infections in cystic fibrosis patients), became one of Keiretsu Forum’s flagship biotech success stories through a series of angel investments starting in 2012.

02

The investment

That July, Keiretsu Forum made what it called its largest single investment to date — $3 million, led by members across the Northern California, Mid-Atlantic (Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington DC), and Northwest chapters — anchoring Savara’s Series B round, which totaled roughly $8 million once a $5.4 million bridge-note conversion was folded in.

03

The journey

Keiretsu Forum’s own retrospective on the deal was later titled “How one pharma startup raised $16M without VCs,” underscoring that the network, rather than institutional venture capital, carried Savara through its early clinical-stage funding needs while it pushed AeroVanc through Phase II trials.

Keiretsu members kept participating in follow-on rounds over the next several years. A 2018 recap from Keiretsu Forum Mid-Atlantic put the group’s cumulative early-stage funding into Savara at approximately $10 million prior to the company reaching public markets — in that same neighborhood as the $12 million figure you mentioned, though I couldn’t independently verify $12M as an exact, sourced total; the figures I found across Keiretsu’s own materials and press releases range from the $3M anchor investment to roughly $10M–$16M in aggregate early backing, so treat $12M as a reasonable approximation rather than a hard-confirmed number.

  1. 2012

    Series B investment $3M

  2. 2013 - 2016

    Follow-on rounds across multiple chapters

  3. 2017

    Reverse merger with Mast Therapeutics

  4. April 28, 2017

    Listed on NASDAQ

04

The outcome

The exit came via a reverse merger rather than a traditional IPO: in January 2017, Savara announced it would merge with Mast Therapeutics, a Nasdaq-listed company (ticker MSTX), in an all-stock deal that gave Savara shareholders about 76% of the combined entity. The merger closed in late April 2017, and the combined company began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker SVRA on April 28, 2017 — effectively taking Savara public.

05

Network Impact

Keiretsu Forum’s Mid-Atlantic chapter marked the moment the following year, joining Savara at the Nasdaq MarketSite on July 23, 2018 to ring the opening bell, with co-founder Howard Lubert noting that early investors “will see a healthy return on their initial investment.”

06

Sources

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