TTOs say they are facing a hard truth when it comes to early-stage financing: Projects that would have been considered “venture ready” a few short years ago are having a much tougher time attracting VC funding today. “The definition of the term \u2018venture ready’ is definitely different than it was a couple of years ago,” says Rick Silva, PhD, TTO director at the University of Colorado Denver. “With respect to biomedical technologies, for example, it means there’s a higher bar pertaining to data and the quality of the team. Venture investors may not get into a deal as early or be willing to back a deal prior to some meaningful proof of concept being in hand.”<\/p>\n
Because downstream funding requirements for drug development are so much greater now, he continues, “there is much more reticence with venture folks to fund therapeutic companies. The prospects of going out and raising $50 million to $100 million are much more difficult now, and [VCs] don’t want to get involved in a deal that will run out of water before it crosses the desert.”<\/p>\n
Ashley J. Stevens, D.Phil. (Oxon), executive director of technology transfer and senior research associate in the ITEC School of Management at Boston University, describes a typical VC’s criteria in the current economic climate: “If you want to fund a drug discovery company, they are comfortable with coming in about one year pre-clinical — and that is a very difficult standard for an academic institution to meet. I’m not saying that in a specific case they won’t consider coming in at an earlier stage, but that’s their current starting point.”<\/p>\n
But Mark Lupa, PhD, a principal at High Country Venture, LLC, in Boulder, CO, cautions against painting all VCs with a broad brush. “It depends what [your fund] is focused on,” he says. “We are focused on an earlier stage; I think we are earlier than most VC firms, but I would not call us unique.” In short, he offers, “there are a large enough number of venture firms that will get into pre-clinical stage deals.” Lupa concedes that “every VC would prefer to get into later deals from which more of the risk has been removed, but that’s not always realistic or practical. We certainly look at pre-clinical deals. He also stresses that the general VC freeze which came in reaction to the global recession is now thawing. “There was a period from when the market imploded until last summer where it was very difficult for anyone <\/em>to raise capital — a recessionary black hole. Since then it has opened up, but it is more difficult than it was two to five years ago.” A detailed article on the what it takes for TTOs to attract venture funding in the current economy appears in the January issue of Technology Transfer Tactics<\/em><\/a>. To get the complete article and become a subscriber, including access to the entire archive of back issues, CLICK HERE<\/a>.<\/p>\n TTOs say they are facing a hard truth when it comes to early-stage financing: Projects that would have been considered “venture ready” a few short years ago are having a much tougher time attracting VC funding today. “The definition of the term \u2018venture ready’ is definitely different than it was a couple of years ago,” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-239384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239384\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"