By Nono Hu, Senior Manager, Branding & Messaging, LSN

At the third Redefining Early Stage Investments (RESI) Conference, LSN brought together experts from six major corporate venture funds that are involved in the early stage life science arena. The speakers shared examples of their recent investments and detailed their investment interests. The panelists also answered a variety of questions, including: What is your take on the resurgence of early stage pharmaceutical investment? How should I approach a corporate VC investor? Do corporate venture funds outperform VC firms, large pharmas, and other sources of investment? What is your advice for scientist-entrepreneurs?

Click on the video link below to hear the views of major players in the life science industry

Moderator: Vikas Goyal, Senior Associate, SR One

Panelists:

• Marian Nakada, Vice President, Venture Investments, Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation
• Jason Hafler, Director of Investments, Sanofi-Genzyme BioVentures
• Mette Agger, Managing Partner, Lundbeckfond Ventures
• Stephen R. Padgette,Vice President, R&D Research Strategy, Monsanto
• Tetsuro Iwata, Senior Manager, MP Healthcare Venture Management

By Michael Quigley, Director of Research, LSN

The research team at Life Science Nation is constantly identifying, interviewing, and profiling investors in the life science space. From Boston to Hong Kong, we leave no stone unturned in our efforts to uncover a variety of investors. This article shares some sources and tactics that we use to initially identify life science investors across the globe.

Investment Conferences

A great way to begin a search is by scouring the lists of attendees and speakers for various life science investment conferences. Investors who recently attended these types of events tend to be actively seeking new opportunities and therefore are ideal prospects for your campaign. With life science investment and partnering conferences taking place year-round and worldwide, there are a lot of potential investors to be uncovered.

Historic Financing Rounds

After pulling names from conference lists for the past year or two, look through private life science financing rounds for lead investors and co-investors. This can also yield a significant number of prospects. At LSN, we use our proprietary financing-rounds database for this purpose. However, databases and reporting sites that focus on more general financing rounds can be used for this as well. Such sources also grant you some visibility into the size and types of funding rounds an investor has participated in, helping you to determine if a particular investor may be a good fit for your company.

Company Websites

Other great and often overlooked sources of investor leads are the websites of early stage life science companies. Many companies list their investors on their website or have one or more investors on the company’s board. By reading the biographies, you can see which investment firm an investor is associated with.

LinkedIn

Finally, LinkedIn, when used correctly, can be a great source for uncovering investor leads. By taking advantage of its filtering capabilities, you can search for individuals by industry, location, and keywords. Although you may not be able to find investors for specific technology types or development stages, LinkedIn is a good place to start. It has helped our research team connect with some investors who we wouldn’t have found otherwise.

 

To do all of these things—and to do them well—is a serious time commitment and is only the tip of the iceberg. When you have your investors identified, you should take steps to validate them to determine who would be a fit not only for a life science company but also for your specific technology and stage. Without proper validation, you will waste countless hours calling and emailing investors who have no real interest in your opportunity.

Next week, we share our insights and tactics for validating potential investors. Stay tuned.

 

By Lucy Parkinson, Senior Research Manager, LSN

At LSN, we track both life science companies and life science investors located all over the world. We frequently stress that if you’re seeking capital in the life science field, you will have more success if you reach out beyond your own backyard and market your opportunity to global investors. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Asia, where a history of concentrated R&D funding has resulted in the flowering of new biotech start-ups in the region.

The LSN Company Platform tracks thousands of life science companies across Asia. As shown in Exhibit 1, some of these are contract research organizations, suppliers, and other outsourcing partners, but many are companies developing innovative biotechnology or medical technology products.

As in the rest of the world, government investment in R&D has resulted in a great diversity of new discoveries. A deeper dive into the data reveals the breadth of technologies that these innovators are pursuing. As shown in Exhibit 2, many therapeutic start-ups in Asia are developing novel biologics.

Exhibit 3 shows the medtech sphere, where diagnostic devices, imaging, and hospital hardware predominate.

So which investors are interested in investing in Asia-based companies? As shown in Exhibit 4, the LSN Investor Platform has hundreds of investors who are looking at opportunities in Asia. Some of these investors have a specific Asia strategy; others are truly global investors who would consider a good opportunity no matter where a company is based.

While institutional private equity funds predominate, investors of every kind show an interest in life science opportunities in Asia, in keeping with what LSN has learned from working with start-ups in the US and Europe. Whether seeking to increase their ROI or to move science forward, investors are willing to look far afield for the right place to allocate, and start-ups are discovering that it’s best not to limit their horizons when seeking capital.