Co-Founder & Managing Director at ARCH Venture Partners · Joined 1986
View Live Interactive Profile →Robert Nelsen co-founded ARCH Venture Partners at its founding in 1986 and has spent nearly four decades since sourcing, financing, and building biotechnology companies from the earliest possible stage - often co-founding them directly alongside the scientists whose research they're built on. His track record is genuinely rare in venture capital: more than 150 companies financed, over 50 reaching billion-dollar valuations, including early seed funding for Illumina, which became one of the most consequential genomics companies in the world. His exits include Bristol Myers Squibb's $14 billion acquisition of Karuna Therapeutics in 2023 and Pfizer's $10.6 billion purchase of Array BioPharma in 2019, and he remains one of the most active biotech investors in the industry, backing three separate billion-dollar-plus rounds in 2024 alone.