Michele Ollier

Dr. Michèle Ollier is a co-founder of Medicxi, one of Europe's leading life-sciences venture capital firms, which she helped establish in 2016 alongside Francesco De Rubertis, David Grainger and Kevin Johnson. The four had previously run the life-sciences practice at Index Ventures, where Ollier was a Partner for roughly a decade after joining in 2006. Medicxi spun that team out to focus exclusively on drug development, and today manages funds in excess of €1 billion. Ollier is now listed on the firm's site as Co-founder and Senior Advisor, having stepped back from a full Partner role while remaining active on portfolio boards.

A physician by training, Ollier completed her medical studies at Paris-Ouest University in France. Before entering venture capital she spent more than fifteen years in drug development and marketing leadership roles across the pharmaceutical industry — at Sanofi International, Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), Rhône-Poulenc Rorer / Gencell / Aventis International, and Serono International. She then moved into finance as an Investment Director at Edmond de Rothschild Investment Partners in Paris for about three years before joining Index Ventures.

Ollier is closely associated with the "asset-centric" investing model that De Rubertis, Johnson and Ollier pioneered in the early 2000s and that became Medicxi's signature strategy: building companies around a single drug asset rather than a broad pipeline, keeping early capital lean and focused, and killing or advancing programs on clear scientific milestones. Over her career she has led investments in and sat on the boards of numerous biotechs, several of which have been acquired by large pharma.

• Asset-centric, single-program bets: Invests in newcos built around one well-defined drug candidate rather than diversified pipelines, concentrating capital and management attention on getting that asset to a clear clinical inflection point.
• Lean, milestone-driven seed capital: Comfortable deploying relatively small early checks (e.g., ~€10M/$11M to reach clinical proof-of-concept) and expanding as data warrant.
• Deep drug-development diligence: Brings a physician's and pharma-executive's lens to the science — she favors strong biological rationale and a plausible, capital-efficient path to the clinic.
• Hands-on board involvement: Typically takes board seats and works actively with founders/management rather than investing passively.
• Sector conviction: Therapeutics across oncology, immunology, dermatology, rare metabolic and neurological diseases, primarily in Europe with selective US exposure.