Category: Redefining Every Stage Investments (RESI)
The Redefining Every Stage Investments (RESI) Conference is an ongoing conference series that provides an international venue for life science companies across Biotech, Medtech, Diagnostics and Healthcare IT and to source investors from around the globe, create relationships, and eventually, secure funding.
The healthcare investment world is just over 90 days out from the annual San Francisco conference week, and investors are already inking their plans for a busy week. Within that hectic JPM ecosystem, RESI SF is a key venue to meet with early stage startups, and many investors are already made their plans to attend.
LSN would like to make our first RESI San Francisco panel announcement: Healthcare IT Investors. This panel focuses on investors that are looking for innovative startups using software to solve healthcare problems, from drug discovery and development to care provision and management. Significant investment is pouring into this sector, with an estimated $4.5 billion invested in 2015. At RESI, we’ll hear from 5 highly active investors from a diverse variety of firms on what they’re looking for in healthcare IT at present, and how an opportunity can catch their attention.
Join us at RESI to hear from these experienced investors discuss how they search for and assess healthcare IT opportunities, and what areas of this diverse sector are most attractive at present.
Hot off the press in September, LSN’s partners at Venture Valuation have created a report on life science financing round data from around the world.
This free report summarises every recorded round that took place in August, and provides summaries of the investment sizes, stages and the hottest areas for life science investment, along with highlights of the most significant financings.
This information is based on reports from dozens of bioclusters worldwide, in addition to the work of a team of analysts focused on early stage life science startups. Subscribers to the LSN Company Platform can access all this information directly.
Biotech and medtech industry executives are already drawing up their itineraries for January’s healthcare conference week in San Francisco. It’s on track to be a busy week for us all. Among the many events and receptions taking place, the Redefining Early Stage Investments Conference (RESI SF) stands alone in providing a targeted opportunity for early stage biotech and medtech companies to schedule up to 16 face-to-face investor meetings in one venue, with the potential for many more ad-hoc investor discussions throughout the day.
Partnering is RESI’s core, but at RESI SF also provides a full day of investor panels and workshops devoted to early stage life science investment topics. We’ll see the return of the RESI Asia-North America track, with content for entrepreneurs who are looking to the Asia Pacific region as a source of investment or future customers. RESI will also feature sessions focused on investors in each main life science technology vertical, and on key investor categories including Family Offices, Angels and Big Pharma, and a new session on Tech Giants in Healthcare.
With a full day of content and meetings, we’re on course for another sellout San Francisco RESI event. Don’t leave it too late to get your ticket.
LSN’s research staff continue to inverview life science investors from all over the world and collect in depth information on each investor’s unique parameters and focus areas. In this article, we’ll take a quick overview of the current landscape. All these charts are based on a sample of investors that have been interviewed by LSN Research in 2016.
Firstly, what type of investors are currently looking into life science and health innovation deals? While venture capital and private equity remain a significant source of startup funds, we also speak with many major corporations in healthcare and their corporate VC arms, in addition to private and family office investors, angels, foundations, and others. A successful fundraise may involve speaking with investors from all of these groups.
LSN focuses on four main verticals within health innovation; therapeutics, medical devices, diagnostics and healthcare IT. Many firms invest in more than one of these sectors; others have a specific lens on only one sector. Among the investors LSN has spoken with recently, medical technology and diagnostics are the most popular sectors. These products can attract interest both from traditional life science investors and from newer players in the sector, including major technology firms that are increasingly taking an interest in healthcare innovation.
Many investors are particular about what stage of development a lead asset must have reached before they’re willing to make an investment. LSN finds that most often, the biotech investors we speak to are looking for preclinical-stage or Phase I assets, with many also open to considering assets at Phase II or later. Given the need for funding at these crucial early stages of product development, our bias is to uncover investors that are willing to stake their money at or soon after the IND.
In medtech and diagnostics, it’s a somewhat different story due to the much compressed development timeline of these products as compared with therapeutics. We find the greatest amount of interest in devices and diagnostic tests that are in clinical trials. While there are many investors out there that will make medtech investments prior to entering the clinic, slightly more are interested in marketed products that need capital for commercialization and growth.
Where are these investors looking for deals? About a third of those we speak with are open to life science opportunities anywhere in the world. Others are focused on one or more regions; the major life science investment regions are shown below.
If you’re looking for capital and need to prepare for a fundraising roadshow, LSN’s curated information on what investors want to see and how to contact them could help you to map out your campaign. If you’d like to take a closer look at the investors that are looking for new technologies in your sector, you can reach out to info@lifesciencenation.com for a demo.
To bring LSN’s Life Science Executive’s Fundraising Manifesto toward a close, we provide some motivational advice and tactical reminders to help a fundraising CEO bring their outbound campaign to a successful resolution.
With illustrations and helpful mottos, this ‘cheat sheet’ chapter will help the reader find their way through the fundraising maze in good spirits. From how to stay optimistic during the tough times, to when to stop marketing to investors, this chapter has it covered.
RESI X featured the arrival of a new panel session – Big Data in Healthcare. If you were unable to attend, you will have another opportunity to hear insights from investors and influencers in the space at RESI SF on January 10th.
The panel, available for your viewing below, was moderated by Nicole Fisher (Founder & CEO, HHR Strategies) and featured the thoughts and experiences of:
Each discussed the unique approaches their firms take toward evaluating big data and software investment opportunities, how they partner with and shape start-up growth, and how the healthcare system landscape is (or is not) shifting to enable a realization of the big data vision.
A unique angle toward the healthcare system and policy was brought to the table by moderator Nicole Fisher, who works on Capitol Hill as a senior healthcare policy advisor, Forbes’ Contributor, and Founder and CEO of HHR Strategies.
At many points throughout the panel discussion, the conversation trended toward how data can improve healthcare delivery and outcomes. Emerging technologies blending healthcare, science, and data do not enter the same marketplace as other generalist tech software; instead they must interface with provider systems and policies in ways that are new and different from the existing therapeutic and device sectors. Morris gave an illustrative example of the “noise” created by this new relationship: he and his primary care physician ordered genetic tests, and faced with interpreting the 24 pages of results realized “neither of us are cardio-geneticists, so now what?” While the technologies advanced by new companies may provide actionable information, the health system will ultimately play a central role in their utilization and continued innovation in the space.
Entrepreneurs need to know that technology itself frequently takes a back seat to other aspects of a company. Getting blunt, de Winter shared: “The way investors think is driven by fear and greed. You want to think about how your idea specifically addresses the greed part of that equation.” Morris, an entrepreneur himself, had to transition away from his natural enthusiasm for the underlying science of a company when he began his career in venture capital. “The order of operations in the way we look at a company is market, then team, then the product, and then finally technology”, he said.
There is consensus that teams are central to accomplishing a company’s goals. Hazlehurst describes how oftentimes a company’s goal is to “translate science into software”. She goes on, “It’s a fun and challenging problem because the lifestyle and culture between the people building in these different domains is very different, and getting everyone you need working together is more than just a technical problem.” Deep and practical expertise in life sciences and software engineering are indeed vastly separate, and teams need to effectively coordinate internally and externally with strategics to formulate long-term visions.
With regard to the technology, two main aspects of big data technologies were touched upon: algorithms and data. Entrepreneurs may be surprised to learn that IP around algorithms is not a core focus of potential investors. Algorithms will change and evolve in response to higher quality or increased data. Therefore, a more important focus is access to high quality proprietary data through partnerships or through its generation as part of the platform. “We have now over 300 million individual patient records spanning 5-10 years, but that’s not enough and we still crave more”, said Pan.
Wearables, which continuously record certain metrics for individuals, inevitably enter conversations about health data. Their true utility to big data applications in healthcare is still unclear, although it is clear that in many respects they empower individuals to better understand and track their daily habits. Creating a distinction, and if necessary a distance, between digital health trends and rigorously validated data acquisition is important to avoiding hype cycles and fostering continued innovation in the field.
How we can ultimately arrive at the vision shared by entrepreneurs, investors, established companies, and individuals is explored in moderator Nicole Fisher’s recently authored whitepaper “The Digital Medicine Crystal Ball: Unlocking the Future of Real-Time, Precise, Effective, Healthcare”, published by EBD Group last month: “It is time we agree on defining and refining the meaning of digital medicine, particularly as it pertains to the toys versus the tools that will usher in a new age of healthcare. This will determine how the proper tools can lead to the most efficient and effective R&D process, strengthen the patient-physician relationship, and simultaneously enable individuals to become the CEO of their own health.”1
Life Science Nation is proud to have hosted these thoughtful and influential individuals and the firms they represent, as well as the many inspiring entrepreneurs doing the heavy lifting to champion their technologies. Said Hazlehurst, “One of the beauties of investing in early stage companies is that you’re waiting for the day an entrepreneur is going to walk through your door and pitch you on something that’s really unique and disruptive.” To our life science entrepreneurs in the audience: get out there and do it. Many, like LSN, are here to help.
Fisher, Nicole. The Digital Medicine Crystal Ball: Unlocking the Future of Real-Time, Precise, Effective, Healthcare. Publication. Carlsbad: EBD Group, 2016. 4.
Following the overview of the fundraising process inChapter 12, we get into some of the nitty-gritty areas and explore a few common pitfalls and how to avoid them. Chapter 13 discusses the importance of getting on the road or hitting the phone to engage with relevant investors, and why it’s important to ensure that all the investor prospects you speak with are kept in context regarding the deal. Finally, the chapter explores how to prioritize your prospects to use your runway time most effectively while raising money.
