Managing Partner, Ascenta Capital

Location: New York, NY

Member Since: 2020

Lorence Kim, M.D. is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Ascenta Capital, a biotech venture capital firm formed in 2022. Previously, he was a Venture Partner at Third Rock Ventures from 2020 to 2022. He served as the Chief Financial Officer of Moderna from April 2014 to June 2020, raising $4.4 billion of capital for the company and deploying resources to discover and advance a pipeline of 24 development candidates across infectious disease, oncology, rare disease and autoimmune disease, including the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. As of his departure, Moderna had raised the three largest private financing rounds, the largest IPO and the largest follow-on offering in biotech history. Dr. Kim joined Moderna after an investment banking career at Goldman Sachs from 2000 to 2014, where he was a managing director and co-head of the U.S. biotechnology investment banking effort. Dr. Kim’s responsibilities included corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions for the biotechnology industry, with several billion in equity and equity-linked financings, and more than $55 billion in M&A transactions.

Dr. Kim is on the boards of Ascenta companies ADARx and Odyssey Therapeutics, as well as Revolution Medicines, Cencora, Flare Therapeutics, and Abata Therapeutics. He is a member of the Board of Governors of the American Red Cross. He previously served on the boards of Cowen and Seres Therapeutics.

Dr. Kim graduated from Harvard, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with an A.B. in biochemical sciences, with an MBA as a Palmer Scholar from Wharton and an M.D. from UPenn School of Medicine.

He lives with his wife and three children in New York City.