Drugs in a Virtual World: The rise of digital health solutions in clinical trials
(Bessemer Venture Partners)
The appetite for pharma tech services is on the rise, creating a surge of emerging companies. In particular, point solutions addressing major challenges in clinical trial management now flood the estimated $50 billion clinical trials market. These tools enable clinical trial research to become faster, cheaper, and more accessible
The greatest entrepreneurial opportunities live across the clinical trials value chain; the COVID-19 macroenvironment has highlighted procedural inefficiencies and technological disparities in trial administration. An emerging class of startups now has the opportunity to revamp clinical trials as digitization becomes an urgent priority within the pharma industry.
Due to the lack of digital infrastructure, close to 95% of trials are delayed by at least one month, costing sponsors up to $8 million per day. Considering these challenges, we expect pharma to build more innovative solutions to improve and automate supply chain processes, and make them more flexible to accommodate decentralized trial designs.
Haystack Announcements: New Fund, Same Model
(Haystack & Semil Shah)
I’m pleased to announce that Haystack is about to begin investing out of a brand new fund – Fund VI, raised in May 2021 – in January 2022. Our new fund is $50M, just like the previous Fund V. Haystack has shown a deep commitment to disciplined fund sizes, time diversification in portfolios, highly-curated co-investor syndicates, and selecting founders, creators, and CEOs we can build relationships with. So far, this formula has worked well.
Fintech Led VC Investment Last Year. Here’s What To Look For In 2022
(Crunchbase)
Financial services was the leading sector for venture investment in 2021 with $134 billion invested, marking a whopping 177 percent year-over-year growth. That compares with overall global venture capital investment, which grew by a still astonishing 92 percent.
With fintech emerging as the leading sector for startup sector investment, here are three trends worth watching in 2022—plus a few words of caution from investors we spoke with.
Samsara S-1: How 7 Key Benchmarks Stack Up
(Tomasz Tunguz, Redpoint Ventures)
Samsara has adopted a few interesting go-to market techniques, and this breakdown of metrics is something founders should follow & include on a deck when fundraising from VCs.
Investing in our Future: €80m to Support European Climate Tech Startups
(Speedinvest)
The bulk of the Climate & Industry Opportunity fund will be used to conduct follow-on funding for our existing and growing portfolio of climate-oriented startups through co-investments in new rounds via existing pro-rata rights, allowing the companies to scale further and help Europe achieve its target of net-zero emissions by 2050.
Speedinvest has already invested in follow-on rounds for two existing portfolio companies, including a €40m Series B round in mid-November in Packhelp, a Warsaw-based bespoke packaging platform that produces two-thirds of its products from recycled materials and supports customers in minimizing the amount of packaging used for shipments. The second being a Series D round in TIER Mobility, furthering their efforts to reduce pollution in cities by providing clean alternatives to traditional transportation.
Modern GTM Planner
(Unusual VC)
Aleberry is digging this free resource for building your Go-To-Market Strategy! Founders take advantage of this tool.
We’ve created this planning spreadsheet to help you understand how to achieve your user adoption and revenue goals. This tool converts the user and revenue goals you want to achieve before your next fundraising round into activity and OKRs (objectives and key results) for you and your team.
After completing this model, you’ll be able to answer these key questions and more:
How many website visitors do I need in a given month?
How many customer meetings should I have every week?
How easy is my product to use?
How do I balance product-led growth (PLG) with a traditional enterprise GTM?
How fast does my user community need to grow?
How much should I spend on hiring and programs?
The Great “PropCo” Opportunity
(Alpaca VC)
We are on the verge of a major inflection point in PropTech land. Specifically, there is an imminent wave of institutional capital flowing into “PropCo” structures — historically the demand for PropCo capital has been mostly limited to Family Offices, Real Estate firms, and a few esoteric Hedge Funds. However, as the use cases for PropCo structures become more prevalent (see case studies below), and historical PropCo investments become more liquid (i.e. recent Point Securitization), we are seeing more and more true institutions enter the fray.
While the real estate industry continues to expand its adoption of technology, startups addressing the industry’s challenges come in many shapes and sizes and have varying capital needs. Some companies may be straightforward software platforms solving transactional or managerial problems, whereas others may resemble tech-enabled professional service providers, which occasionally require a large investment in hard assets — more closely resembling traditional real estate investing. As such, a one-size-fits-all investment approach is rarely appropriate.
