Old-world Venture Capital struggles to compete with new-world technology…
This week, the Westchester Biotech Project held its Innovation in Research 2018 conference in NY. It was a big success, and while the presentations and the panels were insightful, some of the most valuable revelations came in the discussions among the delegates.
HeartChain Vice-Chairman, Jean-Marc Orlando was there, explaining HeartChain’s innovative platform to revolutionize medical research funding. The more delegates he met, the more they sounded like a broken record.
Innovators from industries as diverse as medicinal cannabis to cell therapy, all had the same complaint. The venture capital method of funding doesn’t work. It takes too long to source, sucks out too much equity from the innovators who founded the company, takes too long to get the product to market and way too long to generate a financial return to the founders.
The only beneficiaries of venture capital are the venture capitalists
Those who do all the research and development of the innovations, are the last to benefit under the VC model. It has become so frustrating for innovators, that some are considering using their patients to do videos to support crowdfunding or kick-start campaigns, as a last resort to get the vital finance they needed to bring their product to market.
When Orlando shared how HeartChain is using blockchain, smart contracts and cryptocurrency to revolutionize the way life science innovations get early-stage funding, Michael Welling, Founder and Co-Chair of the Westchester Biotech Project, invited him to speak at its next event in July.
The reception for this pioneering model of using cryptocurrency as off balance sheet, non-dilutive funding, was overwhelming. As Jean-Marc explained, “the HeartChain platform will host ICOs for innovation products that have a strong chance of getting to market. The tokens offered in the ICOs are called Innovation Product Tokens (IPT). Each token represents ownership of one innovation product at its early-stage development cost — so it represents ownership of a product, not of an idea or speculative gamble.
When the product comes to market, the token owners can redeem it with the innovation company for the new retail market price, or donate it back to the company for further research purposes.”
Multiple options for token redemption
This is the first ICO business model offering multiple redemption options for token owners. Another aspect of the HeartChain model is that the company itself is running an ICO to raise funds to launch the platform. It is offering HeartChain tokens (HCT) that offer membership to the HeartChain community. The members (HCT owners) will get priority access at discounted rates, to the various ICOs on the platform.
For more information and to download the whitepaper go to www.heartchain.com. To keep up to date with HeartChain news, join its Telegram community.
