Thesis Building: Anti-Requests For Startups
Alix Ventures — Supporting Early Stage Life Science Startups Driving Patient Impact 🚀
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Overview
The 21st century will be an era defined by biological innovation. The convergence of technological based platform approaches to solving biological problems will lead to some of the most impactful solutions in decades. Our passion is to help build transformative companies ahead of this revolution to significantly impact the quality & effectiveness of health care.
At the heart of our strategy as an early stage fund is a high touch and founder first approach. We take pride in being among the first investors and our ability to provide value with our world class network of founders, scientists, and advisors. In order to achieve this quality of partnership, we have hyper focused specifically on the goal of driving patient impact. As such, we’ve also identified a few common verticals that we unfortunately do not spend time in. These ‘anti-theses’ are not necessarily verticals that we don’t see value or long term potential in, but rather areas that we don’t see ourselves capable of providing the same standard of expertise and assistance that we pride ourselves in.
Anti-Thesis Categories
- International: We strive to be value add investors & to support companies holistically. We invest exclusively domestic (USA) due to the concentration of our network (industry contacts & hiring pool) is almost entirely stateside.
- Single Indication Diagnostics: Our bias is towards computational diagnostic platform approaches, where the company is valued based upon the potential of the platform to span multiple indications. Single indication companies are often pure bets on biology & generally lack the multi-shot on goal approach we so desire.
- Single Asset Therapeutics: Our bias is towards computational therapeutic platform approaches, where the company is valued based upon the potential of the platform to generate a pipeline, rather than the company being valued based upon a lead asset. Single asset therapeutics companies are often pure bets on biology & generally lack a multi-shot on goal approach we so desire. This affectionately is what we call the difference between “east coast vs west coast” biotech. We believe that “west coast style” platforms allow for repeatable asset generation & with the assistance of technology provides a larger margin for error.
- Medical Devices: Medical devices is a space where hardware driven approaches have typically not allowed the exit multiples that we look for, and with the costs of FDA approval, we typically opt for other verticals. As this so called “double whammy” is too much to swallow at the early stages.
- Microbiome: The microbiome is an exciting area of research with what we believe is strong potential to impact human health and wellbeing. However, we worry that there has not been an established scientific North Star to guide early stage startups and that without one, there is significant biological risk remaining.
- Longevity: The long term potential of longevity science is something that the team is greatly excited by, but we lack the conviction to believe that the current state of the science and regulatory state of affairs is conducive to commercialization.
- “Wellness”: Startups tackling the health and wellness space typically have not had the extent of patient focus that we prefer. Their clinical approach often comes secondary to the consumerization of the business and their care protocols are often not the main differentiator. As a result, we choose to focus on companies with stronger patient focus.
- AgTech or Alternative Forms of Bio: AgTech and alternative forms of bio are immensely impactful and solve incredibly meaningful world problems. However, as a fund we are focused entirely on driving patient impact. While tangential, this space does not fall in our thesis areas.
Conclusion
As a fund, we must be honest with ourselves and deploy our efforts based on where we see we can add the most value. We look forward to working with the next generation of great entrepreneurial scientists 🔬
Visit our website @ alix.vc to see our portfolio & areas of research
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