By Sougato Das, President and COO, LSN
Partnering conferences are a great place to meet investors, in-licensors and strategic partners. These events tend to be segmented in the following ways:
1) Focus: General, Licensing/BD or Investment
2) Modality: Biotech, Device/Diagnostics, Digital Health
3) Therapeutic area: General or Therapeutic area-specific
4) Stage: General or Early Stage
While it seems obvious, it is critical to align your events (and your limited time and budget) with your company objectives. In my experience at dozens of different partnering conference, I’ve found that each of the above are largely binary. For example, while a Licensing/BD conference will have some investors attending, you’ll have many more meetings with investors at a investment-focused meeting. And vice-versa. Additionally, an interesting pattern that I’ve noticed is when it comes to stage, a partnering event that has a general focus tends to skew late-stage (clinical or later, with lots of players looking for phase 3 or commercial assets). This leaves companies with preclinical or early clinical assets scrambling to identify and meet the relatively few investors who are interested in early-stage companies.
Since partnering conferences allow for a limited number of outgoing meeting requests that can be in the ‘requested’ state, it’s important for you to be able to identify the attending investors that are a good fit for your company. This is complicated by the fact that investors typically don’t do a stellar job populating their profile with information that makes their remit clear. While it may be tempting to use the filters provided by the partnering system to identify best-fit investors, this ONLY works if every investor profile is consistently populated. Why? Because blank values are not returned in filtered searches. What does that mean? That means that if you use the filters in the partnering system to look for those who invest in oncology, and there are some oncology investors who have not filled out their therapeutic area field in their profile, those investors will not be returned in the results. Some partnering conference providers, such as RESI, prevent this issue by having the staff populate the investor profiles on behalf of the investors, ensuring that all profiles are complete and searchable.
All that said, what do you need to look for to find the investors that fit your company best? The most important criteria (that you probably know already if you’ve done any investor outreach) is stage. “Too early” is a response that every pre-clinical and phase 1 company has heard a million times. At RESI it’s easy. You can filter accurately on stage. But at other conferences that depend on the investor to self-populate their profile, you’ll have to read the profile carefully and visit the website. If it doesn’t say explicitly, then look at the portfolio companies.
The next aspect is the assets under management and the check size range. This kind of information not only shows if the investor is appropriate for the amount you’re raising, but also shows if the investor is indeed an investor and not a financial consultancy or investment bank (in some conferences, such entities end up being classified as investors).
Next, and as alluded to above, is the therapeutic area focus. While many investors go across therapeutic areas, some focus on only one or a few.
Next is the modality. Of course if you’re a med tech investor you don’t want to target a biotech-only investor. Within biotech, there are some investors that only do advanced therapies and some who do everything except advanced therapies. Etc.
Next there is the geographic focus. Some investors target specific geographies.
Finally, there is the investor type or model. Not all investors are equity investors. Some are debt, some royalty, some are venture builders, some are CROs that provide services for equity, etc.
If you have access, looking up the investor in Life Science Nation’s investor database will return all the details you need with regard to the above. Other databases have information on investments a given investor made, which provides some insight. By ensuring the investor you send a meeting request to is actually suitable for your company, you’ll maximize your ROI and, with any luck, extend your cash runway.
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