At RESI@JPM, LSN put together our first ever Consumer Health panel. The session spotlighted investors who focus their allocations on companies that are developing technologies aimed at the consumer health market. The firms represented on the panel are Johnson & JohnsonInnovation, HealthQuest Capital, Montreux Equity Partners and Astarte Ventures. These experienced investors speak to how they see the consumer health market developing and what proof points they typically look for prior to investing. Participants also give firsthand insight on the investments they’ve made in this burgeoning sector.
To hear directly from the investors, watch the RESI video recap here:
In the biotech and medtech worlds, January is a key month for meeting with potential partners and investors. At RESI and other events in San Francisco, I talked to many entrepreneurs about their experiences in fundraising during the healthcare conference season and found a few common challenges.
Meet the Right People
Especially during the January whirlwind of meetings, it’s easy to say that you’ve been meeting with investors and building your network. I’ve found that it’s more useful to ask not if you’ve had meetings or even how many, but if you’ve been meeting with the right people. It’s important to find out in advance of an event whether there are investors attending who are a fit for your company and your technology. Some of the major January events are well known for focusing on later stage, publicly traded companies, so early stage companies often have to do more legwork to find the right investors to book meetings with. This might involve booking meetings in locations away from events or arranging to meet at a smaller event or reception.
Take a Broad Approach
January is a good time to get exposure to the full scope of the life science investor world. Investors gather from all over the world to join the annual San Francisco biotech circus, and they all bring their own unique mandate and life science investment insights with them. Unfortunately, not all the entrepreneurs I spoke to were open-minded about investors. I met one medical technology entrepreneur who had been trying to book meetings with family offices. At LSN, we work with many family offices that invest in the life sciences, but they’re only one among the many investor categories to which we reach out. I suggested that the entrepreneur contact a particular corporate VC that specializes in his type of technology and have since heard that he’s entered a dialogue with them.
Don’t Become Complacent
There’s a great temptation to put on an upbeat facade about the meetings and events that occur in January. Even if you’ve met with many investors who seemed very interested in your company, you have to consider that they also met with many other exciting entrepreneurs as well! It’s a bad idea to count your chickens when it comes to seeking investment. Investors generally see far, far more good quality life science assets than they’re able to fund, and even if you’re progressing through their deal process, you can’t assume you’ll get the allocation. It’s important to keep pursuing as many leads as possible until the check hits your bank.
On April 11th, Life Science Nation will be bringing together hundreds of senior level executives from investment firms, corporate strategics, and emerging biotech, medtech and digital health companies to the TMCx accelerator space at the Texas Medical Center in Houston. The recent RESI Conference in San Francisco had nearly 800 registrants and a full partnering floor. The event drew so much interest that registration was shut down a week prior to the event – and we received many regretful notes from those who wished they’d signed up sooner!
In addition to the firepower that LSN brings to the table, TMCx will be showcasing their second class of digital health and medical device technologies which will be announced later this month, and JLABS will be bringing senior executives from Johnson & Johnson and a number of entrepreneurs from the JLABS incubators.
RESI@TMCx will be a venue for entrepreneurs to meet with all 10 categories of investors LSN tracks including Family offices, Corporate Venture Funds, Angel Groups, Venture Philanthropy, Venture Capital and more. The RESI Partnering Forum will allow fundraising executives to identify and book up to 16 meetings with those diverse life science investors who fit their company’s technology sector and stage of development. Through an expansive series of investor panels, RESI @ TMCx will present current topics covering investment mandates and procedures for identifying and qualifying candidates. Additionally, RESI’s workshops will provide more in-depth advice on every aspect of the fundraising process.
Congratulations to Clearsight, Eve Medical, and Briteseed for their success in the RESI Innovation Challenge last week; at LSN, we hope that the success of these companies in RESI’s virtual fundraising challenge translates into real investor dollars!
If you’re interested in seeing your company’s name up there on the winner’s list, you can now apply to the RESI@TMCx Innovation Challenge for the conference on April 11, 2016. Successful applicants will be provided with a spot in the RESI Exhibitor Hall, and the challenge provides entrepreneurs with a way to engage with RESI’s audience of active life science investors throughout the event. All RESI attendees are provided with “RESI Cash” tokens that they can allocate to the entrepreneurs whose technologies they expect will be most successful. At the end of the day, the capital invested will be tallied up and the top 3 participants will be announced.
This exhibition-style, interaction-focused format was developed by LSN because we’ve found more traditional “pitch contests” to be of poor value for startups. If there are any active life science investors viewing a pitch session (and we’ve found that many investors just aren’t interested in this format), they don’t have a direct way to interact with the pitcher and offer their feedback. RESI therefore focuses on providing startups with the opportunity to meet investors face to face, both through one-on-one meetings and informal networking, and the RESI Innovation Challenge provides entrepreneurs with an eye-catching way to make those in-depth conversations happen.
If you’re developing a cutting-edge biotech or medtech product, apply to the RESI Innovation Challenge to put your technology into the spotlight. We’ll look forward to seeing you at RESI@TMCx.
With LSN’s Redefining Early Stage Investments (RESI) conference coming up next Tuesday, I am delighted to announce the good news is RESI seems to have caught fire in the early stage global investor community, with investors making up half of the registered attendees.
The bad news is, when you add that to the fundraising CEOs, RESI Innovation Challenge participants, exhibitors and sponsors, we’ve reached capacity at our venue. We’re therefore unable to take any more registrations.
However, here’s the program guide; we hope that if you didn’t make it to RESI@JPM, you will be able to join us at one of our three events later this year in Houston (April 11th), Toronto (June 23rd), or Boston (September 13th). If you’d like to attend a future RESI event, plan early!
Life Science Nation’s mission of connecting scientist entrepreneurs with capital gave rise to the Redefining Early Stage Investments (RESI) conference nearly 3 years ago. As we approach our seventh RESI conference, during the highly anticipated JP Morgan week in San Francisco, we’re expecting a record of well over 300 investors representing over 200 different firms in attendance. Figure 1 shows a breakdown of investors by type who will be at RESI San Francisco on January 12, 2016. You can also view the firms represented here.
Venture capital is the most represented investor type, and this includes a growing number of non-traditional venture firms in today’s investment landscape. For instance, the relatively new emergence of the “micro VC” has more capital flowing into seed and series A stage companies. As shown here, several other investor classes looking for early-stage life science technologies that don’t fall under the venture capital umbrella also have a large presence at the RESI conference. This diversity of investors means that RESI Partnering can provide RESI’s great variety of attendees with the opportunity to make a connection with a financing partner that’s the right fit for their round.
Life Science Nation’s network of varied investor types will be showcased on an assortment of panels throughout the day. The 16 panels scheduled to take place at RESI San Francisco will cover the full range of companies in the life science space (biotech, medtech, diagnostic and health IT) and the different investor class’ tactical guidance for navigating the investment process of their respective niches and outlook on the future of each sector. The LSN research team’s unique perspective on the investment landscape has spurred a new panel that will be held for the first time at RESI San Francisco, Consumer Health “Investing in Innovative Products for Healthy Living,” and the return of two panels from former RESI events, Asia-Pacific Investors, “Forging Cross-Border Collaborations in Healthcare,” and Orphan & Rare Disease Investors, “Seeking Returns On Investing In Small Patient Populations”.
The fundraising process is typically a lengthy one, therefore multiple interactions with prospective investors and strategic partners are essential to a successful campaign. The RESI conference is an ongoing series that provides just that, allowing entrepreneurs to interface with a diverse field of investors, foster existing relationships and make new connections throughout the year, at multiple events. RESI San Francisco is just the first stop for 2016, with additional RESI conferences being held in Houston, Toronto and Boston, later in the year.
This ongoing chain of conferences coupled with the forward-looking investor mandate information used in our partnering platform really makes RESI stand out in terms of the ability to make meaningful connections. To see a demonstration of just how effective the partnering system can be at finding a match, please watch this video.
At LSN’s RESI San Francisco Conference next Tuesday, January 12th, the Corporate VC & Strategic Investment panel will focus on how major pharmaceutical companies evaluate and invest in early stage life science companies, both through corporate venture capital arms and internal investment units.
In this panel, corporate VC and major pharmaceutical investors will discuss the types of companies they’re interested in investing in, and how they structure these opportunities to achieve their strategic aims. Panelists will provide advice on how entrepreneurs can engage with a corporate investor, and what to expect from an investment relationship with a large pharmaceutical company.
Moderated by Edward Hu, CFO & CIO of WuXi AppTec, the audience will hear from:
Carolyn E. Green, Executive Director, Strategic Investments, Worldwide R&D, Pfizer
If you’re a fundraising entrepreneur seeking strategic investments with a major pharmaceutical company, this panel is not one you want to miss. RESI San Francisco is already the largest RESI yet with over 700 attendees. This will be a great opportunity to expand your network in the life science space, so register now before it’s too late.
The firm is focused on therapeutics companies and does not invest in medical devices, diagnostics, or digital health. The firm is open to considering assets of very early stages, even those as early as lead optimization phase. The firm considers various modalities, including antibodies, small molecules, and cell therapy. Currently, the firm is not interested in gene therapy. Indication-wise, the firm is most interested in oncology and autoimmune diseases but has recently looked at fibrotic diseases and certain rare diseases as well.
The firm is opportunistic across all subsectors of healthcare. Within MedTech, the firm is most interested in medical devices, artificial intelligence, robotics, and mobile health. The firm is seeking post-prototype innovations that are FDA cleared or are close to receiving clearance. Within therapeutics, the firm is interested in therapeutics for large disease markets such as oncology, neurology, and metabolic diseases. The firm is open to all modalities with a special interest in immunotherapy and cell therapy.
A strategic investment firm of a large global pharmaceutical makes investments ranging from $5 million to $30 million, acting either as a sole investor or within a syndicate. The firm is open to considering therapeutic opportunities globally, but only if the company is pursuing a market opportunity in the USA and is in dialogue with the US FDA.
The firm is currently looking for new investment opportunities in enterprise software, medical devices, and the healthcare IT space. The firm will invest in 510k devices and healthcare IT companies, and it is very opportunistic in terms of indications. In the past, the firm was active in medical device companies developing dental devices, endovascular innovation devices, and women’s health devices.
A venture capital firm founded in 2005 has multiple offices throughout Asia, New York, and San Diego. The firm has closed its fifth fund in 2017 and is currently raising a sixth fund, which the firm is targeting to be the largest fund to date. The firm continues to actively seek investment opportunities across a […]
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