Sitka Partners: Turning Rain into Gold

The strong, lightweight timber of the North American Sitka spruce is so valuable that the tree became known for turning rain into gold. When entrepreneur Louis Nisbet, PhD, and venture capitalist Gérard Tardy founded Sikta Partners three years ago, it was to help young companies in the UK and European health care sector extract similar value from their resources through offering strategy and fundraising advice. As biotechs start to emerge from their harshest funding winter in years, "our aim is to help groups clearly think through their strategy and how to deliver on it, and to make sure they get enough capital, at each fundraising, to make a significant difference within the company before they need to go back for more," explains Nisbet, who also founded biotech firm Xenova Group PLC .

Sitka's target audience: 2-3 year old firms, mostly in the UK and France, operating within what has become known as...