By Dennis Ford, Founder & CEO, LSN

As the early stage life science landscape continues to shift and investors are raising new funds, altering their mandates or shifting into or out of the sector completely, it’s increasingly challenging to stay on top of what life science investors are looking for. If you read this newsletter you know that LSN’s philosophy is to find investors that are a fit for your technology and stage of development. This is much more efficient than reaching out blindly using a ‘shotgun approach’ to approach any investor that has ever been involved in life sciences. Raising capital is all about efficiencies. Remember, it’s a numbers game – an executive fundraiser will do infinitely better when reaching out to investors that you know are a fit for your firm. Vetting and regularly adding new investors to your target list is a necessary part of this process.

This is why the LSN Investor Platform added a new feature this week; Save Search, which allows users to save their global targeted lists of potential investors and receive email alerts daily, weekly, or monthly when LSN uncovers new investors that match these criteria, or if changes are made to the profiles or mandates on your list.

LSN’s profiling and matching technology allows you to filter for investors that are interested in your technology. You can search the LSN Investor Platform to find all the investors that have self-declared an interest in companies in your field through a one on one phone conversation with LSN’s researchers. You can now start the process of qualifying and contacting hundreds of potential investors, with live support from LSN’s Save Search feature to alert you to the newest investors in your field. You come into work on a Monday morning and new investor alerts are sitting in your email box.

 

When fundraising, it is critical to leave no stone unturned and to move quickly and efficiently. With this feature in place, entrepreneurs will be able to receive a constant flow of information on relevant investors, and can use these updates to get their technology in front of every potential partner LSN identifies, quickly.  Considering that the research team has been bringing in 20+ new and updated mandates per week, this allows for users to be able to get the maximum value of the platform by assuring that no potential investor falls through the cracks.

 

By Lucy Parkinson, Senior Research Manager, LSN

If you’re a regular attendee of life science investment conferences, you’ll have found that most of these conferences offer 15-minute presentation slots as a means of attracting scientist-entrepreneurs to the event. An exclusive speaking spot in which to tell the whole crowd about the breakthrough technology your company is working on can certainly sound like an attractive offering. But in reality, LSN has found that the 15-minute model offers very poor value to entrepreneurs.

Many presenters arrive at the event anticipating this chance to speak about their technology to a large audience of interested investors; however, entrepreneurs will invariably find that these 15-minute presentations are only attended by other CEOs looking to garner IP and positioning, and vendors hoping to sell their services to the presenters, while the attending investors are busy networking or taking partnering meetings elsewhere. Investors have limited interest in watching these public pitches and therefore these presentation opportunities provide low value to an entrepreneur seeking investment. Rather, the best way to share your presentation with an investor is through one-on-one meetings where you will have the investor’s full attention and can engage in a back and forth discussion about your opportunity. Receiving an investment requires building a relationship with an investor; it’s much easier to begin that relationship with a personal meeting rather than a public pitch._­­

This is why, after experimenting with the 15-minute model at our first ever RESI event and discovering up close how flawed it is, LSN turned our back on the public pitch approach. Instead, we doubled the number of partnering slots available at RESI and created a new form of presentation that provides much more value; the RESI Innovation Challenge. Rather than limiting their presence to only 15 minutes, we showcase our innovators on the exhibition floor for the entire duration of the event. RESI Innovators are provided with an easel to display a poster board marketing presentation, and each attendee is given ‘RESI Cash’ to ‘invest’ in the innovators in a virtual challenge, with winners announced and prizes awarded at the end of the day. While our available slots for the Innovation Challenge have sold out, our partnering software is already live and there are still hundreds of meeting slots available.

The opportunity for both marketing and personal engagement provided by the RESI presentation and partnering model has been praised by both investors and innovators. If you’d like to see how it works for yourself, please join us at Fenway Park on September 17th.

By Tom Crosby, RESI Conference Manager, LSN

Institutional Strategic Investors: Point-of-Care Institution Panel

The lack of capital available for early stage life science companies has brought many different groups with strategic interests to the table. This panel aims to shed light on the institutional strategic companies that are now funding early stage commercial research in the space, many of whom have a primary goal of lowering the cost of care. Moderated by Monique Yoakim-Turk, Partner at the Technology Development Fund of Boston Children’s Hospital, the audience will hear from:

• Barbara Gamez Sims, Technology Licensing Manager, Mayo Clinic Ventures
• Manu Nair, Vice President, Technology Licensing Manager, Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation
• Chris Coburn, VP, Innovation, Partners HealthCare
• Kanad Das, Program Manager, Stanford SPARK

Groups including hospitals and healthcare providers will discuss their differentiating investment models and structures, as well as what they can provide beyond just capital. What types of technological innovations are these groups most interested in? How do they go about sourcing new opportunities? At what stage of development do they tend to get involved, what do they look for in early communications, and what is their role with a company’s development following investment?

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I-Banks, 3PMs & Consultants: Fundraising Partners Panel

As early stage fundraising has been challenged of late, many emerging companies elect to use a fundraising partner — such as an investment bank, independent advisor or consultant — to take the lead on capital raising activity. The question is, can an investment bank make a random process more efficient?

Moderated by Colin Widen, CEO of Boston Innovation Capital, the audience will hear from:

• Paul Papi, Director, Investment Banking, Freedom Investors Corporation
• Dan Ross, CEO, IMS Health Capital
• John Cullity, Partner, Torreya Partners
• Adam Cutler, Managing Director, Trout Group

The core of the discussion will focus on weighing the pros and cons of outsourcing your fundraising efforts. Panelists will discuss the unique characteristics among new entrants to the life science investor pool, and more importantly, how to access these entrants. What changes with your approach depending on the type of investor you’re dealing with? What are the different levels of time to participate among these investors? How does the picture change when working with for-profit vs. philanthropic players? The role of data as a fundraising tool will also be highlighted throughout the session.