A healthcare-focused venture capital firm based in Taiwan is investing from its new fund that is set to close in Q3 2017. The firm seeks to lead or co-invest in Pre-A to Series A rounds. Typical allocation size ranges from US$500 K to 1 million. The firm is looking for companies across the world with a focus on North America and Europe.
The firm is most interested in therapeutic projects, especially in the CNS space. The firm prefers assets with preclinical or early clinical validation. The firm is open to all modalities. The firm also considers medical devices and diagnostic technologies.
The firm is looking for experienced teams and typically requests board representation post-investment.
If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email mandates@lifesciencenation.com
A $50 million strategic corporate venture capital fund formed by an oncology-focused pharmaceutical company seeks to make equity investment in startup companies that discover and develop innovative therapeutic products and/or drug-enabling platform technologies that demonstrate a clear potential to benefit cancer patients. Investment size can be flexible depending on the deal. The firm will also consider the option-type of investments and spin-outs, in addition to pure equity investments. The fund is currently seeking opportunities in the U.S., Europe and Japan. and opportunities mainly in US and Europe.
The firm considers a wide variety of modalities (both biologics and small molecules) within the oncology field. The firm focuses on programs from drug discovery to preclinical development.
The firm is looking for teams with strong sector expertise. With the support of the parent company’s established expertise in the field of oncology product discovery and development, the firm will provide financial resources and company outreach to build strategic alliances to help translate novel research and high potential drug candidates into cornerstone products. The firm may request regional option or rights on a case-by-case basis.
If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email mandates@lifesciencenation.com
A corporate venture capital fund based in Europe with offices worldwide invests in medical technology companies that are strategically relevant to its parent company. Investments in equity rounds range from $1-5 million, and are made worldwide.
The fund’s primary focuses within healthcare are medical imaging (including both equipment and software) and diagnostics (particularly point of care diagnostics and molecular diagnostics). In these sectors, the fun focuses on products used in a hospital setting. The firm also invests in healthcare IT solutions that add value to imaging and diagnostics, such as data-as-a-service products. The fund is potentially interested in medical robotics. The fund will invest in any medical indication area, and only invests in companies that have attained proof of concept data for their product, with a preference for companies that have a product on the market that can demonstrate traction and revenue.
The firm generally does not attach strategic rights to an investment other than the right to be informed if the company is seeking a buyer. The firm requires a board seat or a board observer in each portfolio company.
If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email mandates@lifesciencenation.com
The first RESI event ever was held in Boston in 2013, with the goal of bringing the startups and the investors that LSN already worked with together for face to face meetings between parties who would be a good fit for each other’s business. From that seed, RESI has grown beyond all our expectations. We quickly outgrew beyond the capacity of our original RESI venue at the State Room – and our next venue at Fenway Park! With RESI’s 4th anniversary approaching, we can show you how the previous RESI Boston events kept getting bigger and bigger – and we expect the September 26th event to be larger yet, with more opportunities to meet with investors and form key relationships that will get new healthcare products to market.
The sheer number of attendees at our annual RESI Boston fall event keeps climbing. Alongside the rise in total attendees, the number of investor attendees has also kept increasing to keep pace:
Not only that, but as the number of RESI participants increases, we’ve added more and more RESI Partnering spots to keep up with the increased need for bandwidth. We expect to have more one on one spots available than ever at our September event.
While raw numbers tell an impressive and continuing growth story, it’s also worth noting that RESI has continued to innovate in terms of content and spread our global reach. The addition of RESI’s newest track, Asia-North America Partnering & Investment, has brought a new constituency of investors to RESI to look for early stage equity investment opportunities and assets. Meanwhile, every time we have brought RESI to a new city – San Francisco, Houston, Toronto, San Diego – we have sourced new investors and startups to bring into the fold, and many of those players have followed RESI back to Boston.
We hope you will join us in September to be part of RESI’s ongoing story.
As the RESI San Diego event is now in the rearview mirror and we prepare to bring RESI home to Boston (Sept. 26th), we wanted to take a closer look at the Medtech Family Office panel session. Family offices are clearly a highly sought-after investor class and are not completely understood by a large portion of entrepreneurs. To that end, we’ve pulled out some of the most insightful points that were discussed and distilled the panel session into this summary video to help shed some light on how family offices evaluate early-stage investments, how to reach them and what differentiates them from VCs and other early-stage investors.
Family offices are not a silver bullet for your financing needs
A lot of entrepreneurs mistakenly believe that finding a family office will solve all their fundraising woes i.e. long-term investors with less rigid requirements. While it is true that family offices tend to be more patient capital and more flexible with terms and deal structures (a result of not having to answer to LPs), these groups are in fact looking for a return and typically will be active either at the board or management level to hit milestones and create value. Additionally, as your company grows and matures, the capital requirements and expertise required for the healthcare space oftentimes necessitate bringing in deep-pocketed institutional investors, who family offices maintain relationships with.
Family offices are purposefully low visibility
Given that family office investors have no mandate or timeline to allocate money, they can wait on the best deals and entrepreneurs to surface, therefore their deal sourcing channels are much different than a VC or another institutional investor. Further, these groups tend to be very much relationship-oriented. Networking is a must to uncover these investors and begin building a relationship, with some of the best events to attend being a part of universities and tech transfer offices as well as focused partnering conferences, such as the RESI conference.
Family offices are not homogenous
This point can’t be stressed enough. While there are some common themes among these groups (mostly dictated by structure or lack thereof), they are largely very different. Some may be more philanthropically motivated as they are looking to fund research/companies pursuing indications that have afflicted their family while others act more like an institutional fund with a focus on returns. It is essential to do as much research as possible on each specific family office to try and find mutual connections and the best way to approach them.
Moderated by Michael Quigley, VP of Investor Research, LSN, the panel includes the following speakers:
Sean Kearny, Managing Director, Three Leaf Ventures
Kyle Williams, President, Bootstrap Incubation
John Kinzell, Sr. Life Science Analyst, The McNair Group
Julia Belaya, Director – Corporate Partnerships, Plug & Play Tech Center
Earlier this year the FDA announced its plans to develop a Digital Health unit comprised of 13 engineers and experts in the digital health world, with the goal of restructuring the FDA’s assessment of digital health completely, making the process for approval more streamlined for new technologies. This announcement follows a trend of easing on regulations for medical software, as last summer the FDA announced that it would not be regulating fitness trackers and mobile apps.
Fitness apps are really just the tip of the iceberg. Things get much more difficult when you begin to evaluate the clinical validity of a constantly changing algorithm that sorts through streams of medical data to diagnose or recommend treatment options. Currently the FDA’s regulatory process is centered around consistency and reproducibility of results. In order to accommodate these new technologies, the FDA too must adapt.
Bakul Patel, the associate center director for digital health at the FDA, will be building and heading the new unit. He envisions a new model for approvals similar to the TSA security line at the airport, where established veterans in the space can quickly pass through, while newer developers or those with less than stellar histories would still have to take off their shoes and get a full body scan (1).
It would appear as though that model is taking shape as just last month the FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced that the FDA would be launching a pilot program under which lower-risk digital health products could be marketed without FDA premarket review, and higher risk products could receive a streamlined review. According to Gottlieb, the pilot would help to certify whether a company “consistently and reliably engages in high quality software design and testing (validation) and ongoing maintenance of its software products. Employing a unique pre-certification program for software as a medical device (SaMD) could reduce the time and cost of market entry for digital health technologies.”(2).
This all is welcome news for innovators, investors, providers, payers, and patients who all stand to gain from the adoption of novel digital health technologies. It would also appear that investors have caught wind early of the FDA’s easing as funding for digital health companies was at an all-time high during the 1st half of 2017 with various research groups citing total numbers between $3.5-$6.5 billion(3). As the FDA solidifies its plans and programs for the review of medical software I would anticipate investment in the sector to remain strong. If the pilot streamlining process proposed by Gottlieb takes hold I could also see more and more large tech firms following in the footsteps of Google and IBM and getting into healthcare, as they have the resources available to qualify for streamlined review.
A pharma firm has created an independent R&D innovation unit to transform early stage innovations into solutions for improving the lives of people with skin disease; the unit is an agile group of scientific experts with an entrepreneurial mindset and a vision to enable precision medicine in Dermatology. The group looks to accelerate breakthrough research projects and technologies by offering scientific expertise and funding to people with great ideas. The group employs a flexible co-funding model and deal structures may vary widely from grants, convertible bonds, equity positions etc. Investments range up to 5 million USD. The unit hub also leverages their large, world-class dermatology network to accelerate projects e.g. help validate novel targets in relevant skin diseases or develop advanced diagnostic technologies.
The firm is exclusively focused on skin diseases, with the vision to enable precision medicine in dermatology. The group’s research focus areas include deep learning, imaging technologies and non-invasive bio-marker technologies. Additionally, the unit continuously explores novel therapeutics (small molecules, biologics, gene therapy, etc.), medical devices, diagnostic technologies etc. that have application in dermatologic indications. The group is open to new ideas and is excited to discuss any opportunities that improve the quality of life of people living with skin disease.
The firm has no strict requirements for companies or management teams and will work with a variety of institutions and entrepreneurs. The group collaborates for the very purpose of advancing science and all collaborations are based on mutual trust and transparency.
If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email mandates@lifesciencenation.com
