Esprit Capital Partners hires Merlin Biosciences founder

Esprit Capital Partners, a European technology venture capital firms, has appointed Peter Keen, Merlin Biosciences’s co-founder as a partner. 

Keen, who left Merlin 2004, will be responsible for the Esprit’s financial and fund raising activity, and will support its investment activity, particularly in the healthcare sector. 

Keen co-founded the life sciences venture capital firm Merlin Biosciences in 1996, where he was UK managing director until early 2003. 

More recently, he was chief financial officer of Arakis, a subsidiary of Sosei, a Japanese bio-pharmaceutical company, where he led a refinancing and successful £106 million trade sale, having been responsible at Merlin in 2000 for the original seed investment.  
 
Keen is a director of Ark Therapeutics Group, a healthcare group, which focuses on cancer therapy; Abcam, an antibodies supplier; and the Finsbury Emerging Biotechnology Trust; an investor in biotechnology companies.  He is also an advisor to Imperial Innovations Group, the technology transfer arm of Imperial College London.

Yesterday Esprit backed Lastminute.com founder Brent Hoberman in an $11 million funding of Where Are You Now?, a travel and lifestyle social network.

Esprit Capital Partners was created by the merger of the Prelude Ventures and Cazenove Private Equity teams in June 2006.  The firm has $500 million of assets under management.