Biotech Capital Raising Insights

Biotech Capital Raising Insights

Treehill Partners operates extensive Healthcare Investment Banking services and world class biotechnology Strategy Consulting as well as Leadership Support advisory services to some of today’s most innovative industry leadership teams. Over the years, as we evaluate investment proposals put forward to corporates, venture capitalists and public market investors, we have reviewed countless one pagers, websites and pitch decks prepared by discoverers and entrepreneurs up to whole corporate teams pitching a particular venture or business.

From our work in the industry, we wanted to share a few key insights for consideration as firms are building their investor pitch and also overall broad themes to remember for capital raising success – which will sound familiar and simple but are all too often overlooked and ignored, unduly putting their authors at a disadvantage in what is a fierce competition for capital.  

Preparing Your Investor Pitch – A Few Selected Themes

New biotechnology innovations are notoriously difficult for potential investors to understand easily and at first glance. Hence:

  • As you are crafting your investor pitch, make use of pictures or diagrams that easily explain your solution. You can use such diagrams or pictorial explanations of your solution on your webpage and one pager as a key part of branding your concept as well. We are in 2019 and there is no excuse for poorly created artwork or copy-paste from publications.
  • Traditionally, one-pagers consisted of a set of well crafted sentences that explain your solution in a simplified concise manner. Today’s approach challenges the traditional one, asking to make it one single sentence. If you can effectively make your ‘one-pager’ a ‘single sentence’, it sends a signal that you are unique in broader perspective of who else investors have to select from while allocating resources. 
  • Team bios are wonderful and essential, but so are professional headshots for each bio. Team bio headshots are essential in starting to build trust in the investor relationship. Team bio headshots answer many questions important to investors seeking to work with excellent teams who have details under control fitting the marketplace. Without headshots, the question looms for investors “Who am I working with?” and even worse may make investors feel like you are hiding something related to the team’s execution capabilities. 
  • Your brand name is essential to your overall success. Sure, you may have a wonderful solution to an important problem but we recommend that you have a brand name that does a lot of the initial groundwork for you in drawing marketplace interest and communicates what you are all about. 
  • Realize that the more sophisticated the investor you are pitching to, the less time they realistically have to review your 30 slide pitch deck. This is why your one-pager, brand name and other details we discuss above is vital to your success. A quality one-pager easily gets the message across, will get you more investor calls and overall more investor interest. Once you have investor interest you can share greater detail with some version of your pitch deck.

A successful approach can be boiled down to first standing out through simplicity, soliciting and listening to feedback to your simple and easily-digestible value proposition which builds relationships with investors. Once a relationship is built on simplicity, your solution and investor deck will be taken more seriously and have greater chances of being successful overall. The art we support clients at is condensing highly complex life sciences technology into simple “door opener” messages and communicable visions that are suitable to enable a follow-on.

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