Simone Song’s ORI Capital closes $260M second fund after CG Oncology success

Si­mone Song re­calls dis­cussing on­colyt­ic virus ther­a­pies with her fa­ther and son “un­der the moon­light, like a fam­i­ly sci­en­tif­ic sym­po­sium” in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia in 2014. Af­ter the in­ter­gen­er­a­tional dis­cus­sion, she post­ed to WeChat about the sub­ject and, through busi­ness con­nec­tions, was even­tu­al­ly led to Arthur Kuan.

Song, then a man­ag­ing di­rec­tor for Greater Chi­na health­care in­vest­ment bank­ing at Gold­man Sachs, would go on to launch her own health­care VC firm, ORI Cap­i­tal, a year lat­er. And in 2017, ORI in­vest­ed in the blad­der can­cer ther­a­py at CG On­col­o­gy, which Kuan stepped in­to as CEO af­ter pre­vi­ous man­age­ment ran in­to trou­bles with a clin­i­cal hold, loss of a CD­MO con­tract and cash re­serves that with­ered to the point of just six weeks of run­way, she said.

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