Understanding the Venture Capital Landscape: Healthcare

Hello All,

Thanks for taking the time to read this first blog post. For a quick intro on me, my name is Roy Walker, I graduated from Swarthmore College in 2016 and have been working for the last two years as a private equity fund investment analyst. I’m writing this blog because I’m an aspiring venture capitalist and wanted to share what I learn as I pursue a VC role in hopes that it’s helpful for others in a similar situation.

I thought that the best way to begin understanding the space would be to take a top-down approach. Because of that, this blog will start with a high level overview of where venture capital firms are investing and then dive into each of the underlying sectors in future posts. Hopefully it’ll also include some conversations with investors and entrepreneurs from across the venture landscape. In doing this, I hope to shed a little bit of light on a historically opaque industry.

First things first: Where’s the money going?

VCs have historically deployed the large majority of capital into two industries: healthcare and technology. According to the PWC / CB Insights MoneyTree report, healthcare businesses received approximately $5.3 billion of funding and accounted for approximately 15% of total venture funding in Q2 2018. Technology businesses accounted for most of the remaining invested capital, which we’ll cover in Part 2 of this post. First, let’s dive into the healthcare industry and take a look at each of its major…