Medtech Start-Up Financing Strategies: Where’s The Money?

It’s an awkward time of transition for medtech venture capitalists and for entrepreneurs looking for the funding to get their ideas developed and into medical practice. What worked as recently as five years ago no longer works today, namely, venture capital syndicates supporting a company from concept to exit. Taking into account lengthy research and development phases for disruptive technologies, a long clinical path to approval, an uncertain regulatory environment, and increasing amounts of data needed to support reimbursement and commercialization, many medical device companies in venture capital portfolios have turned into decade-long propositions. Financing risk – the ability to fund a company from start to exit – is perhaps the biggest uncertainty that venture firms and their portfolio companies face today, especially as limited partners have migrated away from the under-performing medtech sector to information technology and health services, where the time to exit is shorter and the returns greater. In the US, there is generally one-third less venture capital (available for investing in any industry) than there was five years ago and the number of venture capital firms and the sizes of funds dedicated to life sciences are shrinking. The medtech industry is looking to large corporate strategic buyers to support the growth of the future products they’ll need but they haven’t quite stepped up, at least not at the early stages. Most of the medical device financings in which corporate investors have participated over the past five years were Series C rounds. (SeeAlso see "Device Start-Ups Reap More Corporate Venture" - Medtech Insight, 21 February, 2013..)