RA Capital Management

RA Capital Management (RA Capital) is an American investment firm based in Boston. It is focused on making public and private investments in the Healthcare and Biotechnology industries.

Background
RA Capital was founded in January 2002 by Richard Aldrich and Peter Kolchinsky. Aldrich was the chief business officer Vertex Pharmaceuticals who left to set up his own company. He invited Kolchinsky, a PhD student at Harvard University to join him due his technical expertise. The firm's name comes from the initials of Richard Aldrich.

The firm was initially set up as hedge fund that invested in public companies although it would later invest in private companies as well. RA Capital has an in-house research group, named TechAtlas that creates its disease-specific maps.

One of the firm's earliest successful investments was its investment into Triangle Pharmaceuticals which Gilead Sciences acquired for $464 million in early 2003.

Aldrich left RA Capital in 2009 to start Longwood Fund, a venture capital firm although he still remains an investor in RA Capital.

In 2009, RA Capital assets fell by 35.3% due to its large investment in Sequenom which lost 90% of its market value after it admitted it had falsified data on its tests for Down syndrome treatment. As a result, the firm limited individual investments to 15% of the firm's assets.

The firm made one of its first private investments in 2010 when it participated in a $15 million series C round for T2 Biosystems.

As of 2015, the firm has delivered an annualized return of 28.4% since its founding.

In 2019, the firm launched its first venture fund, RA Capital Nexus Fund I which raised $300 million.

SEC fine
In September 2014, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced it had sanctioned nineteen firms that illegally participated in stock offerings less than five days after short selling the stock. RA Capital was one of the firms and agreed to pay the largest amount out of them with disgorgement of $2.65 million, interest of $73,000 and a $905,000 penalty.