By Rory McCann, Director of Marketing & Conference Producer, LSN
The Entrepreneurship Lab for Bio- and Healthtech in NYC (ELabNYC) invites you to join next week’s Due Diligence Master Class, August 3-5. Learn from 18 active investors and 5 founders, who have collectively raised over $300M in the past year, to develop strategies for professional fundraising success!
Hear from investors and founders from:
Included in this event is an in-person networking reception at InnoLabs on August 2 with investors, founders, and mentors! The RESI community can save 20% off registration with code: COMMUNITY20.
A healthcare and technology focused venture capital fund based in USA an Europe only makes equity investments into private companies and has no specific preference in the investment stage. The firm primarily invests in companies that are based in the United States, China, Japan, India, and Europe. The firm is actively seeking new investment opportunities.
The firm is currently looking for new investment opportunities in Biopharmaceutical, Therapeutics and Diagnostics, Medtech, R&D services, and Healthcare IT. Generally the firm invests 65% in Therapeutics, 15%-20% into Medtech/Diagnostics and 15%-20% into HIT/Sevices.
The firm highly prefers to invest in companies with a strong and experienced management team. However, the firm is flexible within specific cases. The firm works with their portfolio companies together to create value for patients and providers.
If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email mandates@lifesciencenation.com.
A corporate investment group that invests strategically on behalf of their parent company uses a variety of structures to work with early stage medical technology companies, including both licensing relationships and equity investments on a case by case basis. The firm is a flexible investor, and the firm’s allocation sizes are wide ranging. The firm invests worldwide.
The firm invests in sectors that are relevant to the parent company’s business groups: Cardiovascular, Restorative Therapies (including spinal implants, neuromodulation treatments for pain and urological disorders, deep brain stimulation, and neurovascular devices), Diabetes, and Minimally Invasive Therapies (including general surgery, gastrointestinal care, pulmonology, and respiratory care and monitoring technologies). The firm is interested in diversifying the parent company’s product and services offerings within all of these groups and also in integrating new fields of information technology and services into the strategic areas, such as IT-enabled patient monitoring and contract management of provider facilities. The firm invests at a range of development stages but generally prefers to work with companies that have obtained clinical data regarding their asset.
The firm has no specific company or management team requirements.
If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email mandates@lifesciencenation.com.
A firm actively funds, supports and advances life science technologies from early development through clinical proof-of-concept. The firm’s experienced leadership team works with scientists and entrepreneurs to provide active mentorship, financing solutions and operational guidance to increase the probability of success in early drug development. The firm has access to capital to support companies from seed investment through Series A and B financings and the size of initial seed investment can range from $0.5M to $1.5M. The subsequent Series A investments will be sized to get through preclinical and IND-enabling work and/or through a clinical development study and can range between $8M-$20M, with flexibility to syndicate with investors for larger rounds. For more mature companies that don’t require a seed round or the need to do complete activities/studies prior to a Series A, the firm can invest directly as a Series A investment along with participation in related Series B investments. The firm is open to global opportunities.
The firm supports opportunities across all therapeutic areas and drug modalities (small molecule, peptides, antibodies, genetic technologies, cell therapy, etc.). Additionally, the firm is open to technologies beyond drug therapeutics, including medical devices, diagnostics and emerging healthtech opportunities (digital health, telemedicine, enabling technologies utilizing AI/ML, etc.). Founder and entrepreneur friendly and supportive of first-time CEOs, the firm works side by side to drive value inflections with the goal to optimize program development and successful outcomes.
The firm is open to working with all types of management teams, including first time entrepreneurs. The firm works hands-on with its portfolio companies by bringing a powerful network, access to resources and expertise to support their growth. The firm prefers to lead but is open to participating with likeminded co-investors to form syndicates.
If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email mandates@lifesciencenation.com.
A USA-based firm invests the capital of a small cohort of high-net-worth individuals. The fund makes growth-stage investments in the healthcare sector, with a highly varied rate and size of allocations. The firm is interested in investment opportunities in North America, Europe and the Middle East.
The firm primarily invests in healthcare services and avoids opportunities that involve scientific or regulatory risk. The fund is interested in approved medical devices and healthcare supplier/engineering companies that have products on the market; healthcare IT, and connected devices/connected hospital hardware are particularly of interest. The firm does not invest in drug development or biotech R&D companies.
The firm only invests in companies with revenues and indications of market adoption; the fund has no lower bar for revenue rates but will not fund initial batches of a product, as the firm requires data on market receptivity. The fund invests with a 5-10 year horizon and is therefore interested in long-term growth opportunities.
If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email mandates@lifesciencenation.com.
By Rory McCann, Director of Marketing & Conference Producer, LSN
Summertime and the living is easy. This old, popular song was clearly not written by a fundraising entrepreneur with an early-stage life science company. While investors, strategic partners, academics, and industry professionals alike put on their out-of-office away message, the startup founder remains in work mode, trying to keep up with and stay ahead of economic trends that could impact their next raise. If you’re spending your summer archiving automatic replies as deadlines loom, know that there is still much you can do to make this time count for you and your team.
If you’re attending RESI Boston, September 21-23 or engaging in networking and partnering once the summer winds down, now is the time to set yourself up for success. There is much to do today for tomorrow to be as profitable as possible:
Prepare and update your marketing materials. When was the last time you reviewed your pitch deck, executive summary, data sheets, etc.? These are the materials that investors are going to want to see ahead of that initial meeting. Has your team grown? Have you achieved any meaningful milestones? Have you benefited from recent press or awards? Have you built new collaborations and partnerships that would entice more investment? It’s important to keep these materials updated and readily available for that next connection.
Build a list of potential partners who are a fit for you. This is especially important if you’re hitting the road and looking to partner and network this fall. Fundraising is a numbers game and now is the time to build up a global target list of investors who are a fit for your product set and stage of development. Answering these questions ahead of outreach has the potential to limit ghosting from investors.
Get your story straight. Understanding your company story and being able to tell it effectively is essential in business. Leaving pitch sessions and investor meetings with a strong sense of who your company is and what it stands for can provide you with an edge over the competition that blends into a competitive market. Many founders unwisely assume that their product and technology is exceptional, and the value should be obvious and speak for itself. That’s a risky move in assuming investors who are a fit for you aren’t also courting your competition. Having a strong brand identity is central to standing out in a crowded space, outlasting the competition, and surviving a transitioning market. Learn to communicate it well and watch how it can change the quality of your meetings.
These are all essential to successful fundraising but contain many soft skills that do not always receive the attention and practice necessary in order to see the benefits. If you’re frustrated by the current pace of your fundraising, take advantage of the time you must make sure you’re walking into a new season of networking, partnering, and pitching with your best foot forward.
Still haven’t signed up for RESI Boston, September 21-23? There are only a couple weeks left to save on early bird rates! Sign up today to save $300!
By Alexander Vassallo, Manager of Business Development West Coast (US), Entrepreneurial Education Lead, LSN
The best entrepreneurs are the best storytellers. Irrespective of the industry or discipline you find yourself in, the ability to deliver a compelling and powerful narrative of your unique technology or product, highlighting clearly why you’ve undertaken a new business venture, is one of the most important skills a fundraising executive must have. Last week’s fundraising bootcamp – “It All Starts with the Story” – delivered by members of LSN’s BD team, Greg Mannix and Alex Vassallo, offered a deep dive into one of the most critical determinants of a startup entity’s success.
Potential partners you may approach during your global fundraising initiatives will be looking for entrepreneurs who have not only managed to portray their company’s unique story into a cogent message threaded through multiple modalities, but they will be looking for authenticity. Finding your voice and being able to inspire partners to learn more about your company is part and parcel of undergoing the transformation from aspiring scientist-entrepreneur to successful life science executive. However, only those entrepreneurs who truly commit to the process and come to terms with the importance of entrepreneurial agency will be the ones who find success in the shark tank.
Finding your voice and developing a compelling narrative goes beyond the obvious benefits of highlighting your startup’s unique value points to potential partners in a meeting. In fact, undertaking this process successfully prepares you to speak different languages within the context of a deal, allocation, or partnership. And by different languages, we don’t mean Spanish or French, we mean business and science. From speaking generally to the gatekeepers who will evaluate the possibility of progressing your investment opportunity down the deal chain, to the navigators and evaluators with whom you can speak more scientifically, and eventually the decision maker with whom you will be speaking a heavily business-centric language, if you can net out your company’s unique story in as little as a 5-7 word tagline and as extensively as a 2-page executive summary and a 10-12 slide pitch deck, you truly will have found your voice.
Most importantly to consider when approaching your potential partners, even more so than the estimated ROI of your opportunity or the unmet medical need being addressed, is the fact that investors will always bet on the team. Investing in a company is commonly referred to as getting into bed with the company or investor; this is a relationship that could last anywhere between 5-15 years, and unless investors see that you have an inspired team behind you that shares your vision and believes in the same compelling narrative, they will be dissuaded from viewing your investment opportunity as a tangible relationship that can grow and develop throughout the years. So not only do you need to get your story straight to bring to potential partners, but to be successful in the early-stage life science arena, you must be able to inspire your colleagues to share in your company’s narrative.
All of this and more was covered in LSN’s Fundraising Bootcamp, “It All Starts with the Story”. If you are interested in learning more, have a look at the recording of last week’s session. We are the industry leaders in connecting early-stage life science firms with active investors and strategic partners, and it is our pleasure to share the story of what we have learnt over the past decade with the next generation of leading industry professionals.
