Meeting recap

Iratel Ventures Breakfast Series #17

We hosted a gathering of local and global entrepreneurs, investors and active ecosystem players at Iratel Ventures Breakfast Series event last Thursday. This was the last in the technology focused breakfasts covering 20 emerging technologies. The technologies for this event were:

Digital Health
Biotech, Medtech, Pharma & Life Sciences

During this session this topics was discussed:

• What are the digital health opportunities in Iran? Can these startups go global?

The group discussed that there are a number digital health initiatives which are mainly focused on bringing the current offline practices online. These are online doctors appointment booking, clinic review systems and prescription booking. Obviously, due to regulations and risk of counterfeit products, digital health entrepreneurs focusing on pharmaceutical products will have to work extra hard to build the right foundation. There are also ambitious unified health cloud systems which aim to connect the health life-cycle of patients and become a data platform. However, these efforts need a government approval and push to get anywhere and get to mass market. There have been some device innovations in the market such as wearables and connected devices for babies, however, most are clones of already-existing products.

Digital health startups will have a hard time going global due to regulatory burdens. If the unified health cloud startups can sign partnerships at government level, there might be big opportunities but they will face tough competition from established or well funded startup players.

Finally, it was decided to keep the discussions going in a semi-open environment and build a support platform for entrepreneurs which would become Breakfast Series’ digital twin. It was agreed that a semi-open Slack team would be the primary communication channel post events. Invitation to the Slack channel will be sent to the participants who provide their email address at the Breakfast Event and show an interest in being part of the discussions on the Breakfast Series Slack channel within a more selective Iratel Ventures Community.

During this session we tested live streaming the event with help from the excellent Lahzenegar team. You can view the full session here.

The next event will be held on Thursday 31 August. At Breakfast Series 18, we will summarise the 20 technologies we discussed in the last 7 sessions and discuss the format going forward.

We believe the more open the dialogue, the better it will allow innovation and bringing different disciplines including investors together. These series were started to increase the dialogue opportunities among ecosystem players and especially to bridge the gap between those who are willing to know more about Iranian startup environment and meet up with other ecosystem players. This will increase openness and transparency.

Finally, if you’d like to be added to the breakfast mailing list, please sign up or follow us on LinkedIn.

This is the seventeenth in a series of posts about Iratel Ventures Events. We’d love to hear from teams with crazy (but commercial) startups. Get in touch or attend our breakfast series. Finally, don’t forget to get your IV Score to prepare for your next VC meeting.

Thanks to Mahyar Khattak and Lahzenegar team for their contributions.