Our Approach

VENTURE PHILANTHROPY

Venture philanthropy provides a way for donations to work like investments and donors to be more involved by funding highly visible activities to achieve the mission of a charity or nonprofit. The RD Fund aims to deliver life-changing solutions for individuals with retinal degenerative diseases today, while also creating a pipeline of next-generation and novel therapeutic opportunities for tomorrow. The RD Fund is flexible in how it structures investments leveraging equity, debt, royalty, and/or project co-funding. All proceeds of this high-impact philanthropic vehicle are returned back to the Foundation to provide resources to further its mission.

INVESTMENT STRATEGY

RD Fund thesis is generally focused on therapeutic companies that range from nearing a pre-IND to clinically staged programs focused on inherited retinal disease (IRD) conditions and dry AMD. The Fund is geographically agnostic.

The RD Fund is unique in that it can leverage the full weight of the Foundation Fighting Blindness’ knowledge and resources including: natural history studies, My Retina Tracker^® Registry, world-class scientific advisory board and clinical consortium. As a result, the RD Fund leverages both internal resources, and investment capital to attract additional investors and is open to using financial instruments including convertible notes, equity, fixed multiple return on investments, and/or royalties, with a preference for ground floor equity investments.

The RD Fund currently has ongoing investments in SparingVision, Nacuity Pharmaceuticals, ProQR Therapeutics, CheckedUp, Nayan Therapeutics, Vedere Bio, Stargazer Pharmaceuticals, Opus Genetics, Atsena Therapeutics, Amber Bio, NVasc, Perceive Pharma, and Perceive Bio.