LSX Congress USA Investor Spotlight

We’d love to see more of the intersection of industries in life sciences – for example, how medical devices, AI, biotech, and IT can work together to deliver better patient care and make people’s lives easier overall. Another interesting avenue can be wellness and AI.

Additionally, deals that are mixed between industries do not need as much funding and can get to revenue quicker than drug discovery ones.

We have developed an acronym to describe what a great founder is – the 7 Hs:

Humble

Honest

Hard-working

Hungry for work

Humour

Humanity

Hurry

The shortest distance between an investor and a founder is a story. Especially for angel investors who may not be very deep into the science, we need a good story.

Secondly, I call it – investor empathy. Investors see a lot of deals and that means you need to be patient with us, deals don’t happen over one conversation. If you come to an investor, as a founder, and make it clear you don’t like fundraising – that’s a red flag for us. Lead with a good story but also showcase how you can create value for investors and try to understand their perspective and lived experiences too. If you don’t know or understand your investor audience, then learn about them – attend meetings, go to conferences such as LSX Congress USA, listen, watch and absorb the knowledge of others.

Cancer: Blood-based tests to detect a broad cross-section of cancers. Improved efficiency to detect cancer during biopsy to enable faster transition to personalized cancer therapy.

Heart Disease: Improved ways to treat atrial fibrillation and value function. Use of robotics and AI.

Management track record, sound business plan, and realistic regulatory plan.

The team needs the skills to morph from pre-clinical to clinical to commercialization.

We are TA agnostic and are highly interested in technologies that can help create next gen assets.

Two gaps stand out to us. The first is a real, comprehensive understanding of China and the broader Asia ecosystem — specifically how SMID-cap companies and Western investors can leverage Asia for development advantages, whether it is speed and cost, access to high-quality assets through in-licensing or leveraging the wealth of engineering talent to create new assets. Most of the market still treats this as a passing headline rather than a repeatable strategy, and the investors who develop genuine fluency here will have a durable edge. The second is a growing compression at the early stage: as capital concentrates in a smaller number of mega-funds writing large checks into large rounds, the smaller, earlier companies — often the ones doing the most differentiated science — are increasingly underserved. How to fund those companies, and who steps in to do it, is a real and widening gap, and it's part of why we've leaned into strategies that let us go earlier and back them deliberately.

We operate across the lifecycle through complementary and synergistic strategies. On our core venture strategy side where we have done a lot of company formation which includes early stage but also creating companies out of new assets and the application of platforms to new product development. Alongside that, we run a smaller public investment strategy focused on identifying undervalued NASDAQ-listed biotechs where we can take an active, hands-on role — reshaping strategy, capital allocation, and often the team to transform the company from the inside, mimicking our private strategy but with biotech that have a NASDAQ ticker. And we've been building newer initiatives that let us go even earlier, into true white-space opportunities where we help form the platform around a novel insight with potential partners aligned from day one. The common thread across all three is the same: differentiated science, a clear path to a value-inflecting milestone, and a place where our active involvement genuinely changes the outcome — the stage just changes with the vehicle.

A tighter capital environment has made us more disciplined about capital efficiency and proof points. We now underwrite every company to a specific, near-term data event and ask whether the money in the round actually gets them there with margin to spare, and we've raised the bar on syndicate quality — we want co-investors who will show up in the follow-on, not just the first round. Lastly, we have a greater focus on investing with an eye toward what the ultimate buyer wants, and incorporating these players from the start.

First, how clearly they articulate what they do and where it sits in the landscape — can they explain the science crisply, show they understand the competitive field, and point to a real biological insight with a defensible reason it hasn't been done before? A team that can't frame its own differentiation in a first meeting usually hasn't fully worked it out. Second, the path to a value-inflecting data point — how quickly, and with how much capital, can they generate a result that de-risks the thesis? Third, the management team — the depth of their experience, the judgment to kill their own ideas, the credibility to attract talent and capital, and the coachability to take input. If those three line up, most of the rest is solvable.