Our Investment in Vinehealth
TL;DR Vinehealth has the three key ingredients we look for in an investment: (1) a founding team who are brilliant yet humble and complement each other’s skills; (2) a clear mission to improve outcomes for cancer patients globally; and (3) a huge market opportunity to support their mission.
EF EUR 11 Demo Day
EF Demo Day’s are always great events — Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck have an incredible knack of finding talented people and then putting them through their programme which produces promising young companies.
Back in March, we saw 29 companies take to the stage on a busy afternoon in Kings Cross. One of the founders pitching was Rayna Patel for Vinehealth:
Our initial impressions
Henrik and I were very impressed with Rayna’s pitch — amongst such a high quality group of founders, the clarity of the presentation combined with the intellect and credentials to back it up made it our stand out of the day.
And it’s clear that we weren’t the only ones who were impressed, with Mike Butcher proclaiming that ‘This is a startup to watch’.
The key = Longitudinal patient data
We saw Vinehealth just at the right time. We’d recently closed our investment in uMed, where we had spent a lot of time understanding the market need for longitudinal patient data and how pharma companies and CROs fit in.
As soon as we saw what Vinehealth were building, we knew that the type of data they were going to generate did not currently exist and was potentially very valuable to pharma companies and CROs involved in oncology.
In simple terms, we currently have the ‘old world’, where limited amounts of patient data are collected every 3–4 weeks at routine hospital appointments. By contrast, in the ‘new world’, enabled by Vinehealth, we’ll have continuous data collection both passively and actively on a daily basis.
A mission & a robust business model
Not only had the founders figured out the value of collecting this ‘new world’ data, but they had also worked out how to distribute the product to patients and build relationships with all the key stakeholders in the different sectors.
For patients: the Vinehealth app (iOS / Android) allows patients (and carers) to monitor symptoms, track medications and receive suggested lifestyle changes based on behavioural science to improve their wellbeing and outcomes
For clinicians: to maximise the benefit from a patient’s use of the Vinehealth app, clinicians will be able to get access to a custom clinicians’ dashboard where they will be able to review a patient’s treatment and symptoms from a data driven perspective, increasing the efficacy of the clinician’s time and enabling a more efficient, cost-effective health service
For business: for pharma companies and CROs who are looking to improve the quality, reliability and speed of clinicial trials or other programmes requiring patient engagement, they will be able to use the core Vinehealth platform to enable this, removing the burden of manual data collection from patients
Vinehealth enables: optimised management, improved wellbeing and better outcomes for patients; never before available data and insights for clinicians to maximise their efficacy; and a platform to speed up the creation and delivery of the next generations of cancer defeating drugs and therapies
A team with deep domain expertise
Building out a company with global ambitions to revolutionise the management of cancer treatment and drive the creation of new drugs and therapies requires an outstanding team.
Rayna and, co-founder, Georgina Kirby are just that.
Rayna and Georgina’s credentials are unquestionably some of the strongest we have come across (see their LinkedIn profiles!), but it was actually a few others things we learned about them as we got to know them that we found even more compelling:
- Hard working: building a company is really tough, yet throughout the fundraising process they were consistently responsive, thoughtful and did what they said they were going to do — this gave us every confidence in their ability to execute and get things done
- Commercially astute: they have always been very focused on making sure they understand the market for what they are trying to sell and make data driven decisions about strategy, pricing, etc. In HealthTech it is possible, if you are not careful, to spend months or years trying to win big contracts to no avail; the founders here understand this and are nimble enough to navigate the challenges of start-up life in this space
- Team builders: Rayna and Georgina have a fantastic relationship which enables them to get the best out of each other, multiplying the effectiveness of what they do. Their approach to hiring has been equally well considered and they are building a team which is capable of punching well above it’s weight
Finally, despite their already myriad accomplishments, they are incredibly down to earth, nice people and it’s a real pleasure to be able to support them on their journey to realise their ambition of building a successful company.
We’re incredibly excited to be a part of Vinehealth’s journey. Look out for the launch of the app coming this month and pre-register your interest here: https://www.vinehealth.ai/
