Hot Investor Mandate 3: Strategic Investment Firm of Large Pharma Invests in Early and Late Stage Therapeutics & Drug-Device Combinations, Especially Interested in Orphan and Rare Diseases

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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 invests in therapeutics, and in this sector the firm is interested in both early and late stage assets. The firm will consider any type of therapeutic technology (including small molecules, large molecules and gene therapies), and has a strong preference for investing in orphan drugs and other niche disease areas. It is preferred that indications have validated clinical endpoints and can be studied using small trials. Indications that require large clinical trials, including as cardiovascular diseases, CNS diseases and primary care indications (such as influenza) will not be considered. Drug-device combinations will also be considered.

The firm prefers to work with companies who have opened dialogue with the FDA. The firm considers a high-quality management team to be a significant requirement of their investment criteria. It is preferred that assets can reach the marketplace 3-5 years post-investment.

If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email mandates@lifesciencenation.com.

Hot Investor Mandate 4: USA-Based Investment Firm Can Invest Over $10M in Innovative Medtech and Digital Health Companies Based in Texas or Southwestern USA

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A venture capital firm that was founded in 2006 and is based in the Southern USA has managed $400 million in total assets, and recently closed its sixth fund. The firm typically makes equity investments into enterprise software, medical devices, and healthcare IT companies in the seed, series A, series B and series C stages. The typical investment size ranges from $3 million to $10+ million per company. The allocation numbers will vary over the next 6-9 months. For early-stage investments, the firm primarily invests in companies based in Texas, but they will also consider opportunities in the Southwest of the US.

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.

The firm generally seeks to invest in private companies. The firm will consider pre-revenue companies and has no specific requirements for the company’s management team.

If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email mandates@lifesciencenation.com.

Fundraising Steps You Need to Take

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By Ashley Durrer, Marketing Manager, LSN

It can be challenging to perfect your fundraising strategy in order to accelerate your work. As a past marketing and business development focused entrepreneur I’ve been exposed to the fundraising environment outside of the life science and healthcare industry. It may be counter-intuitive, but fundraising processes (as well as constructing partnerships) are similar across different industries except for their smaller nuances.  Scientist-entrepreneurs and fundraising CEOs need to know that a clear value proposition made up of your tagline, executive summary and more will be the differentiating factor in progressing your discussions with investors past the initial conversation. The ones who can share their value proposition with the most clarity, are the ones investors will move forward with for fundraising opportunities. Here are some fundamentals everyone needs to know.

Entrepreneurs know it takes a lot of hard work, dedication, and funds to make a company successful. If you’re new to the fundraising sphere within the life science and healthcare industry, you may be unsure what to prioritize and where to start. Life Science Nation (LSN) is a company focused on providing resources and conferences focused on initiating new opportunities for strategic partnerships and fundraising activities. LSN makes it as straightforward and simple as possible so you can maximize your success. That means having a solid understanding of the fundraising process and knowing what steps to take in order to execute a deal or partnership.

Define Your Value Proposition

At the foundation, it’s imperative to understand your own branding and communicate it clearly to your constituents. If you don’t understand your product, services, and goals, they won’t either. This includes clearly defining your addressable market and growth potential to global investors and strategic partners. Otherwise, it will be an upward battle to convince them to support you as a partner or financially. If you then consider that it takes 6-18 months to fundraise (always longer than hoped or expected), clarity for your mission becomes crucial to speeding up the fundraising or partnership process.

LSN wants companies to be ready for the initial conversations so they can get to the next phase sooner. The next conversations are where you work through the deals and partnerships, and not stumbling over the value proposition for too long. Know your product set, it’s development stage, and how it fits into investors mandates and requirements. Make sure you have these to share verbally as well as through marketing materials: an executive summary, pitch deck, etc.

Create and Curate an Investor Database

Now that you’ve defined your company, goals, and growth potential, it’s time to create a target list of investors or strategic partners. This can be a daunting task and normally starts by networking with current, established relationships. This is a great starting point to expand your network, and will usually provide hot leads for best matches. LSN expands upon this by opening up companies and investors to their network of constituents. It is a real advantage, where other industries have to rely solely on their personal connections.

Match Your Company Product Set with Investor Mandates

If you can match you and your company with the right fit people for you, then it’s a lot easier to start having those initial conversations that lead up to deals and strategic partnerships. Since this is a challenge, LSN chose to specialize and develop its company to connect products, services, and capital to support individual efforts to target an investor audience and network with potential matches.

LSN created a two-sided platform: ‘For Company’ side and a ‘For Investors’ side. It’s intuitive search functions make it easy to use for sourcing information for deals and partnerships. At its core, it saves potential strategic partners, investors, and fundraising CEOs time on research, so they can instead focus on the important tasks of engaging in conversations that match their interests–filling the pipeline for new opportunities which in turn accelerate businesses, technology, and deals.

The LSN Company Platform (for investors and strategic partners) is the premier life science company database, covering over 50,000 companies from around the world, with a particular focus on the earliest stage companies who have been missed by traditional data providers.

The LSN Investor Platform (for companies) includes present and future-looking investor data collected and curated by LSN’s Investor Research team through ongoing dialogue with LSN’s 5,000 life science investors from around the world. The team updates the database to only include active investors who are currently allocating funds to projects and companies that fit their mandate requirements.

The Investor Platform:

  • Includes investors from 10 categories: Angels, Corporate Venture Capital, Endowments/Foundations, Family Offices, Government Organizations, Hedge Funds, Institutional Alternative Investor, Large Pharma/Biotech, PE, and Venture Captial.
  • Track goals and requirements over the next year for investors
  • Facilitates targeted deal flow so investors are a fit for you

The LSN Platforms include:

  • Portal with filters to identify potential leads for you: location, investor types, product sets, investment interest section, phases, etc.
  • LSN’s Investor Platform includes mandates, differentiating them from other databases
  • By mentioning your connection to LSN, it facilitates your connections and provides credibility

Ask LSN for a demo to learn more.

Network Face-to-Face

After completing your target list, you’ll realize warm introductions mean a lot in propelling the conversations forward, past the initial talks. That’s why Life Science Nation created the Redefining Early Stage Investments (RESI) conference. LSN knew entrepreneurs and fundraising CEO’s needed a central location with access to potential global investors and strategic partners. With limited time and much to do as a startup, they need tools and resources to work efficiently. While networking is crucial to any company’s success in sourcing new opportunities, RESI is the best within the life science industry in providing such a venue.

The Redefining Early Stage Investments (RESI) Conference is an ongoing conference series that provides an international venue for early-stage life science companies to connect with global investors and strategic partners for new opportunities, all in one place. This includes interests across Biotech, Medtech, Diagnostics and Digital Health in order to create new relationships in these areas as well as the potential to secure funding. RESI is unique and the leading conference in partnerships due to its global network presence, unmatched by other conferences in the healthcare industry. It provides constituents with the best venue for partnering and networking.

The RESI Conference:

  • Occurs 5x per year
  • Includes ad hoc meeting opportunities
  • Partnering Forum for up to 16 scheduled meetings
  • Panels by investors, sponsors, partners discussing all things healthcare and fundraising
  • LSN 5,000 Investor network is always invited to attend

To learn more and attend upcoming events, please visit the site.

Now that you’ve learned the fundamentals for your fundraising strategies and partnership opportunities, you can start defining your value proposition, creating a target audience, and network with the right people.

 

Life Science Nation Connects Products, Services, and Capital

Our corporate structure is made up of a few different business models with the same mission to accelerate therapeutics, biotech, medtech, diagnostics, and digital health within the healthcare industry. LSN started out developing a database of investors because the company felt there was not enough accessibility for investors to discover scientists-entrepreneurs and fundraising CEOs within the life sciences. Further down the line, LSN created a conference series to further accelerate and support initial conversations between these groups so progress could be made in leaps and bounds. As we continue to develop in our current political environment, it has become more important than ever to continue supporting and facilitating advances in healthcare.

In Mental & Behavioral Health, Investors Find Challenges and Opportunities

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By James Huang, Research Analyst, LSN

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Mental and Behavioral Health contains many highly prevalent but stigmatized health conditions, which can lead to a lack of interest from investors, therefore prolonging the development of treatments for these conditions. The Redefining Early Stage Investments (RESI) Boston Summer Conference on June 4, 2018 included a panel devoted to “Investing in Mental and Behavioral Health” to shed light on the subject. Despite the stigma associated with mental and behavioral health, there are investors working in the space to identify and fund digital health solutions for these high-need conditions.

For the panel, five mental and behavioral health experts shared their insights on the advancement of digital health solutions for mental and behavioral health conditions. The panelists covered topics such as: the current progress, areas or technologies that may raise skepticism, what they hope to see in the future, and whether investors face a similar stigma for targeting these specialized companies.

The discussion between the panelists brought to light many issues, such as hesitancy to work with passive data collection in a space with sensitive information, and a reluctance to diagnose these disorders in primary care due to an inability to treat effectively. The discussion on passive data collection and the skepticism around it is particularly thought-provoking and discussed thoroughly in the second clip highlighted below. You can watch and learn from the panelists insights regarding each of the prompts listed.

Moderated by Julie Papanek Grant, Partner at Canaan Partners, the panel included:

  • Justin Baker, Scientific Director, The McLean Institute for Technology in Psychiatry
  • Ken Duckworth, Senior Medical Director for Behavioral Health, Blue Cross Blue Shield of MA
  • Robert Garber, Partner, 7wire Ventures
  • Eric Schaeffer, Senior Director, Neuroscience Innovation, Johnson & Johnson Innovation

Where Do These Investors See Progress?

What Areas/Technologies Are These Investors Skeptical About?

What Types of Technologies Do They Want to See in This Space?

Is There a Stigma Towards Investing in Mental and Behavioral Health?

As Robert Garber from 7wire Ventures mentioned, digital health solutions for mental and behavioral conditions, was not thoroughly reviewed at all when he first explored investment opportunities in 1996 despite the prevalence of mental health being ignored. Since then the topic is more openly discussed, so investors have seen a floodgate open resulting in a substantial increase in startups focused on mental and behavioral health.

As Ken Duckworth from BCBS of Massachusetts states, given the long history of prejudice and injustice for those suffering from mental and behavioral disorders, there’s a hesitancy to provide data given privacy concerns. While there still aren’t any solutions to adequately protect privacy concerns, this panel hopes to bring an even wider audience to the discussion to advance further ideas and potential treatments.

This panel will continue to be part of the agenda during RESI Healthtech Week featuring new voices and expertise, so if you’re interested in watching the live discussion on this topic, please be sure to join us there on September 6, 2018 too.

Hot Investor Mandate 1: Global VC Firm Headquartered in Asia Invests in All Parts of Therapeutics, Medical Devices, Diagnostics, and Digital Health

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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 wide range of industries. 1/3 of the fund is dedicated to global/USA-based life sciences and healthcare investments, while the rest of the fund will focus on investing in Asia-based companies. On average, the initial size of investment is in the $2-5M range but the firm has the capacity to invest more in companies they identify as a strong fit. The firm can participate anywhere from Seed to Series B, but Series A is their sweet spot.

The firm is an opportunistic investor and will consider therapeutics, medical devices, diagnostics, and healthcare IT companies. However, the firm will generally avoid single therapeutic assets and those that are pre-clinical or earlier. The firm is open to novel medical devices of all FDA regulatory pathways, including 510k and PMA. The firm is strongly interested in platform plays, or technologies that have implications in multiple disease areas or indications. Examples include novel drug delivery platforms, drug discovery platforms that leverage AI or machine learning, regenerative medicine, etc.

The firm considers the management team’s character and entrepreneurial spirit – more so than the team’s experience – as one of the most important factors in the investment screening process. Each partner of the firm will dedicate their time to become acquainted with the management team and determine their degree of fit. The targeted market and the company’s competitive edge are also important considerations. The firm prefers to act as the lead investor and will seek board representation, but is also open to co-investing.

If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email mandates@lifesciencenation.com.

Hot Investor Mandate 2: USA-Based Venture Capital Firm Invests in Medical Devices, Diagnostics, and Digital Health with Strong Interests in Applications of AI and Machine Learning

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A venture capital company founded in 2005 and located in California manages just under $70 million in assets across 2 funds and makes equity investments into companies ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars to $2 million with additional capital reserved for follow on rounds. The firm is looking for companies located throughout the United States and plans to make 4 new investments over the next 6-9 months.

The firm is looking for companies developing Medical Devices and Diagnostics, Healthcare IT products and Life Science Research Tools with an emphasis on fast to market low capital intense products that reduce the cost of delivering quality healthcare. For Healthcare IT investments the firm is most interested in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) applications and is generally not interested in Telehealth and EMR solutions. The firm is open to all sub-sectors and indications in the Medical technology space except for those targeting diseases and disorders of the spine. The firm will invest in both seed and later stage companies.

The firm is looking for companies with skilled and experienced management teams. The firm generally looks to take a board seat into companies after investment and play and active role in the management. The firm is willing to invest in both public and privately held companies.

If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email mandates@lifesciencenation.com.

Hot Investor Mandate 3: VC Firm Seeks Investment Opportunities in Digital Health and Medical Device Technologies that Address Problems of Large Unmet Need in Healthcare

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A venture capital firm spun out of a leading university looks to provide primarily seed stage financings to companies ranging from $100K – $500k initially with up to $5-6 million provided over the lifetime of the investment. The firm prefers to invest in companies in the Eastern United States but is open to considering companies from around the globe. The firm could make as many as 6-7 investments over the next 6-9 months.

The firm is looking for companies working in sectors of digital health and more selectively medical devices. The firm is only interested in companies that are targeting very larger markets/unmet needs and is not interested in companies that require FDA Approval. The firm is especially interested in companies utilizing software for the optimization of various products and processes within healthcare. The firm is not interested in consumer-facing products.

The firm is very open to working with young entrepreneurs and generally looks to take a board seat following the investment. The firm is looking for companies with the potential to become very large organizations capable of being worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email mandates@lifesciencenation.com.