Private Company Edition: Recent biopharma venture capital financings add up to $1.7bn, including a $135m crossover round for HilleVax after spinning out of Takeda in July to advance a norovirus vaccine, Skyhawk’s $133m in fresh funding and Obsidian’s $115m series B round.

Pfizer, Sanofi, Bristol Myers Squibb, Gilead’s Kite, Lilly’s Dermira, Janssen and Biogen among the major companies announcing transactions this week.

The conventional wisdom in the medtech industry is to pursue the “razor-razor blade” business model, as each placement of capital equipment generates a lucrative annuity of recurring revenues from disposables. The corollary to this conventional wisdom is that so-called “big iron” is to be avoided as, in sharp contrast, it suffers from greater early cash requirements and longer sales cycles that create difficulties forecasting quarterly revenues, and provides no annuities. But that view is no longer the only one that counts, Health Advances CEO Mark Speers argues.

Device and diagnostics fundraising slumped in Q2, but there was a substantial uptick in M&A activity. Device financings totaled just slightly over half of the previous quarter, while acquisitions grew almost six-fold, thanks primarily to Becton Dickinson's $23.5 billion play for CR Bard. Financing in diagnostics slid to $1.03 billion, less than half of Q1, whereas the $1.7 billion in M&As (most of that from PerkinElmer's $1.3 billion buy of EuroImmun) was more than double Q1's aggregate.