Tag Archives: resi conference

Foundations as Investors

5 Jul

By Karen Deyo, Investor Research Analyst, LSN

Life Science Nation knows summertime can be a lull for fundraising, with many investors out of the office. This can make it more challenging and extend a fundraising campaign. LSN spoke with one of the investors attending and speaking at the RESI Healthtech Week this fall, asking him to share his insights into an often-overlooked resource in the fundraising process—foundations as investors.

Jim Golubieski, President of New Jersey Health Foundation and its affiliate, Foundation Venture Capital Group, LLC, will be speaking on the “Foundations” panel, sharing his insights and experience. It will discuss non-profit organizations that provide support and funding to early-stage startups.

Below are the answers to two questions asked by Life Science Nation.

What will RESI attendees learn from you?

Jim: “The most important takeaway from my session would be for attendees to know that many foundations and other not-for-profit organizations are no longer simply fundraising organizations but can also be great sources of capital funding that might be overlooked. It is also important to explore all avenues when seeking funding – attendees should research individual foundations to see what types of organizations and projects they fund, to explore if their missions and goals are compatible with their own.”

What makes you excited to attend RESI?

Jim: “From a strategic perspective, attending RESI means that all the components needed for early-stage investment opportunities are under one roof, in one place at one time, to meet with and explore the entire funding cycle. The opportunity to talk with our colleagues—investors, CEOs, scientists, entrepreneurs and potential partners— is an exciting concept.”

The Foundations Panel will be held on Day 1 – First Coast Innovator’s Gathering
Wednesday, September 5th, 2018 at 2:00 PM – 2:50 PM

Panel topics to be discussed may include:

  • What is the foundation’s preferred stage of development when supporting companies?
  • How to approach foundations for fundraising.
  • What criteria do non-profits use to evaluate opportunities?
  • What are the differences between support from non-profit investors compared to for-profit investors?

When foundations support startups, it is with an eye to their mission as opposed to profit. These missions can range from regional development to advancement of a cure or treatments for a particular disease. Foundations play an important role in the fundraising landscape, often assisting companies to grow to the level required by more traditional investors. Panelists will discuss their approach to supporting early-stage companies and how these companies can benefit from a partnership with a foundation.

To learn more and to attend the panel, sign up for RESI Healthtech Week.

James M. Golubieski

James M. Golubieski is President of New Jersey Health Foundation and its affiliate, Foundation Venture Capital Group, LLC, a company that provides pre-seed funding to new health-related startup companies founded by New Jersey researchers to help them advance toward commercialization.

Mr. Golubieski works closely with the companies in which Foundation Venture has invested, sits on their Boards and provides guidance in helping them to develop their business models.

Previously he had been CFO of Array Medical, Inc., a medical device start-up company established in 1995 that developed a groundbreaking blood test to test platelet function. The company was sold in 1999. Mr. Golubieski was also the chief operating officer and senior executive vice president of Glendale National Bank and a member of its board of directors, president of Glendale Investment Corp. and Glendale Mortgage Services, Inc. and chief financial officer of Glendale Bancorp, which was acquired by Mellon Financial. For 10 years prior he had been with KPMG.

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Fundraising Steps You Need to Take

3 Jul

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.

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In Mental & Behavioral Health, Investors Find Challenges and Opportunities

28 Jun

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.

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