City Hill Leads $6M Financing to Pioneer RA Diagnostics at Ignyta

Ignyta, NexDx, Jonathan Lim

San Diego-based Ignyta, founded in 2011 as NexDx with a focus on improving the diagnosis and treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, says today its Series B financing has expanded to $5.5 million—about $2.5 million more than its original target. With a $500,000 loan provided in June by Silicon Valley Bank, Ignyta says its Series B financing now totals $6 million.

In a statement today, Ignyta says Dallas, TX-based Colt Ventures joined in the expanded round, along with other institutional and individual investors, including former CEOs and CFOs of publicly listed biotechnology companies.

Ignyta was co-founded by Gary Firestein, a professor of medicine who is now the UC San Diego dean and associate vice chancellor of translational medicine, and Jonathan Lim of San Diego’s City Hill Ventures. (The company, which licensed the diagnostics technology from UCSD and has four patent applications pending, says the scientific discoveries that fueled the founding of Ignyta are described in the July 2012 issue of Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases.)

Jonathan Lim

Lim, who founded City Hill Ventures after taking San Diego’s Halozyme Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:HALO]]) from a startup with five employees to public company, describes City Hill as small and “very hands-on, operational venture firm.”

In an interview a few weeks ago, Lim told me he’s closed his first fund after making only five investments, including Eclipse Therapeutics, which he founded with anti-cancer antibody technology acquired from the closure of Biogen Idec’s San Diego facility. Australia’s Bionomics acquired Eclipse in September for about $10 million, about 18 months after Lim founded the startup and City Hill invested $2 million to advance the technology. (City Hill also has invested in San Diego-based Independa, and was the founding investor in San Diego’s Inhibrx and Medenovo.)

“We’re building companies that are not going to be in JAMA anytime soon,” Lim told me, referring to the Journal of the American Medical Association. “But these are companies that are going to be very important to patients.”

Lim, who is currently the CEO at

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.