Novo Holdings, the investment company that controls Novo Nordisk and holds the wealth of the Novo Nordisk Foundation, is backing a fund aimed at Italian drug startups, according to Bloomberg.
The move extends a pattern that has seen the Danish investor push capital into life sciences hubs well outside Copenhagen, including European deep-tech vehicles backed alongside the European Investment Fund and the NATO Innovation Fund.
Novo Holdings is not a household name in the way Novo Nordisk is, but it is the entity that actually owns and steers the drugmaker behind Ozempic and Wegovy.
It ended 2025 with total assets under management of DKK 694 billion, or roughly €93 billion, a figure worth stating precisely given how often the older, larger number still circulates.
That AUM was down sharply from the €142 billion reported a year earlier, a drop Novo Holdings attributed mainly to the fall in Novo Nordisk’s own share price after its obesity-drug rivalry with Eli Lilly intensified. Money troubles at the parent company have not slowed the venture arm.
Novo Holdings’ venture team invested about $749 million into startups in 2025 and took part in eighteen private venture rounds, more than any other firm BioPharma Dive tracked that year.
Italy is a market it already knows well, if not yet as a venture destination, thanks to its 2024 acquisition of contract manufacturer Catalent.
That deal handed Novo Nordisk a fill-finish plant in Anagni, south of Rome, and the Italian government has since signed off on more than €2 billion of additional investment there through 2029, alongside roughly 800 new jobs. It is a manufacturing relationship, not a venture one, but it gives Novo Holdings an existing footprint that a cold entry into Italian biotech would not have.
The venture arm’s broader European strategy has also been shifting toward acceleration hubs. The Novo Nordisk Foundation-backed BioInnovation Institute is rolling out its CardioMetabolic Bridge programme, a roughly €60 million effort to move academic research on obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease toward commercial startups, with its first site opened in London in June and Italy and Germany named as the next locations later this year.
Whether the Italian fund is a distinct vehicle or an extension of that programme was not detailed in material available at the time of writing. Rival European life sciences investors are moving on separate tracks: Thena Capital recently closed a £45 million fund for UK medtech, while Stockholm’s BioLamina secured a €20 million EIB loan to scale cell-therapy technology it already supplies to Novo Nordisk.
Italy’s own state apparatus has been trying to build a domestic venture base for years, with CDP Venture Capital running the country’s National Innovation Fund.
A foreign anchor investor with Novo Holdings’ balance sheet would be a meaningful addition to an ecosystem that has struggled to match the scale of funds in the UK, France or the Nordics.
Milan-based life sciences investors such as Sofinnova Partners and Panakes Partners have built track records locally, but neither operates at anything close to that scale.
Italy has research output and clinical expertise that is not being converted into startups at the rate seen in Boston, London or even Copenhagen, and a well-capitalised anchor investor could change that.
Novo Holdings has made a similar case before, in Germany and the UK, using its scale to draw in co-investors who might otherwise sit out early-stage life sciences bets.
It is a strategy less about backing any single Italian company and more about building the plumbing, incubators and translational funding, that produces the next one.
What remains unconfirmed is the exact size of the commitment and whether Novo Holdings will hold a formal board or advisory role, and there was no additional public disclosure on those specifics at the time of writing. Denmark’s biggest pharmaceutical fortune keeps finding reasons to plant flags outside Denmark, and Italy’s turn appears to have arrived.
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