What I learned at IndieBio Demo Day

Last week I had the privilege of attending the IndieBio Demo Day where 14 Biotech companies pitched their companies to a packed house of hundreds of investors, press and tech enthusiasts. This was my first foray into the Biotech space; I’m usually firmly situated amongst pure business-related software startups, but I was invited to attend and welcomed the opportunity to broaden my horizons.

In addition to wanting to discover the latest in biotech wonders, I also wanted to learn the differences and similarities that biotech startups have compared to regular business startups.

Before I get into my assessment of the startups that presented last week, these are things I discovered about biotech startups:

1. The path to market entry for biotech startups is typically a lot longer than other startups.
2. Even though the time to market can be longer, these biotech startups were raising seed rounds that are comparable in size to their pure-business counterparts, around $1.5M+.
3. Because of the longer timeframes, biotech startups need to devise ways to maintain momentum and figure out interim measures for revenue until their ultimate goal is able to be achieved. The pitching companies would demonstrate this by sharing their market focus in concentric circles, like this:

From the companies that pitched, I noticed some common themes:

• Food creation from cells rather than from animals
• Health Monitoring
• Scaling of Medicine

Food creation from cells rather than from animals

Avoiding waste, saving the environment, eliminating pesticides in our foods. These are all benefits that are achieved from the food creation startups below.

• New Wave Foods
  These ladies want to save our oceans by producing seafood at the cell level. They’ve started with creating fake shrimp. I tasted it — pretty close! What was really interesting is one of the markets that they identified — the kosher market. It’s a HUGE opportunity if they can create shrimp for the kosher crowd.
• Memphis Meats
  By using beef and pork cells to create more beef and pork cells, they’re able to create things like meatballs without relying on farming techniques, saving the earth and it’s CO2 levels. They didn’t have any to try (why is that?) but I don’t see why it wouldn’t be just as tasty as regular meet.
• Gelzen
  Creating gelatin in the lab. Great idea to save animal waste and the environment. I’m not so sure about their plan to sell to the candy companies though, but that’s just my bias against sugar in the American diet.

Subscribe to my posts

Health Monitoring

• Truust Neuroimaging
  After these guys showed their tech, the room responded in extremely enthusiastic applause, that was not replicated for any other startup pitch that day. They demonstrated how they are revolutionizing the way you can monitor brain activity by showing how the brain responds and the electrical pulses that are occurring in real time through a 3-D model.
  I’m not negating that this is interesting and valuable technology, but I have actually seen this done before, in a talk I attended by Rob Gazzaley of UCSF. In that talk, Rob paired up with Rob Garza from the Thievery Corporation to demonstrate what a brain looks like when it’s listening to music, they called it the Glass Brain. It was very cool stuff indeed.
• V-Sense medical
  Able to measure vital signs from a distance, without connecting wires, this technology has some real applications in various markets, and they are starting out with accessing the aging facilities market. I think this technology has promise and is definitely one to watch.

Scaling of Medicine

There are a lot of promising health technologies out there, but many of their challenges lie in the ability to scale those solutions to the masses. As with any early hardware technology, the costs start out high and as improvements are made, they are made more available through the gradual reduction in pricing. There were a few of startups aimed at helping to reduce these costs:

• GenesisDNA
  They are calling themselves the next generation of gene synthesis by leveraging pick and place machines. Gene Synthesis has some interesting applications for companies like Lygos, Bolt Threads and the very controversial Monsanto.
• Indee
  Hailing from a University in my native Australia, these guys have created a way to perform gene editing at scale. Gene editing was recently used in the UK to reverse a baby’s rare blood cancer. So the technology exists to do so, but it can be cost prohibitive, so their technology aims to solve this at scale.

This was the second batch of companies that Indie Bio presented and overall, I was very impressed, and I think the crowd was too. I don’t think the organizers quite expected the huge attendance this demo day received. Hopefully they’ll choose a larger venue next time as these demo days are definitely worth attending in the future.