Excalibur Group

Excalibur was founded in 1996 as a fund advisory firm specialising in equity investments in European life science companies under the Merlin brand. Excalibur's conceptual foundation was the combination of science and entrepreneurship in human medicines. Sir Christopher Evans had already founded Chiroscience (later merged with Celltech), Celsis, and... Enzymatix, among other companies which ultimately returned hundreds of millions of dollars to the private equity investors who backed them. In 1996, Sir Chris founded the Merlin group of companies as a number of unique medical science investment vehicles. Merlin Ventures was the original boutique which attracted several hundred deals a year from all over the UK. At this very early stage in the European biotech life cycle, there was virtually no seed capital investors prepared, or sufficiently skilled, to make the necessary early stage investments backing speculative, high risk bioscience research projects. Merlin Ventures was managed by Peter Keen, a close partner of Sir Chris's from Chiroscience PLC. They created an investment vehicle, Merlin Equity, which contained only Sir Chris's personal funds and this vehicle exclusively seeded all of the early Merlin Ventures portfolio companies.Read More