The Future of Early-Stage Deep Tech Investments in Europe

2006 was a fantastic year. The colossal crisis that hit the western world as the dot.com bubble burst was long forgotten, and capital seemed to be available at every corner. Nobody was aware yet of the coming doomsday of the global financial sector in 2008.

Many new companies started to take off in the first decade of the new millennium in life science.

• Intercell- founded in 1998 - did its IPO on the Austrian stock market in 2005. Werner Lanthaler led the IPO as a CFO and built Evotec into a global innovation engine.

• Marinomed started in 2006 as a spin-out of the University of Veterinary Medicine, founded by Andreas Grassauer and Eva-Maria Grassauer.

• Nabriva - founded by Rodger Novak, now Co-Founder and President of CRISPR Therapeutics - was spun out of Novartis in 2006

• Themis Bioscience started in 2009, led by Erich Tauber and acquired by MSD for 1,1 billion dollars (according to Pitchbook)

• Apeiron Biologics started in 2003, developing the research results of Josef Penninger.

These are just a few examples of companies that started alongside major financial crises, like the burst of the dot.com bubble and the 2008 financial crisis after the collapse of the Lehman brothers.

Starting a company was a massive adventure in those years as no startup ecosystem existed like Europe has today. Also, finding mentors, coaches, and seasoned life science investors was hard work when the ecosystem was young.

A lot has changed since 2006; the ecosystem evolved into a great support system for scientific founders, with the first successes of life science companies; more knowledge about the secrets of structuring deep tech companies is available than two decades ago.

But is the world perfect now, or are there still challenges that need to be overcome to create a better breeding ground for deep tech teams and their technologies that have the potential to change the world?

McKinsey digs deeper into Biotech.

As discussed in a previous blogpost, the consulting firm McKinsey looked at the Biotech sector in Europe very closely and came to some fantastic conclusions in a recent study.

A lot of work still needs to be done, and I wanted to look at these hot topics with proficient people in the field.

In this conversation, I will talk with Alexander Schwartz and Ingrid Kelly Spillmann about the future of the Early-Stage Ecosystem in Europe.