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System C: The Convergence of Food and Health

We're here to talk about food system innovation. When we first started this conference, we talked about agtech, and as investors we also focus on healthcare and the convergence of healthcare and agriculture. Innovation is now being...

4 Investment Themes for 2021

With 2021 well underway and public markets still exuberant, we think it's an important time to highlight some of the key private market venture investment themes that iSelect Fund has identified for the year. We continue...

Health, Innovation and Happy Returns: iSelect’s Venture Investment Themes for 2021

At iSelect, Food is Health in 2021 and beyond.

We see robust investment opportunities in the technologies transforming the Agriculture, Food and Wellness markets.

As 2021 begins, we highlight several of our key venture investment themes:

iSelect Invests for Impact and Performance: 3 Case Studies

At iSelect, we invest for impact AND performance. We are a research-driven organization dedicated to deep diligence and careful execution.

We invest in companies that are addressing critical global issues, in large markets, and with a projected...

WOULDA, COULDA, SHOULDA

Missing Out is Always a Big Theil

It’s 2004. you’re the first investor in a start-up social media company with 1M users and, you believe a fair valuation. You garner a board seat and watch the rest...

How iSelect is Investing with Impact Without Sacrificing Performance

Impact investing has grown up.

Originally associated with environmental and sustainability causes, the concept is now expanding to include diversity issues, social impact, healthcare and food access and more. Today, it’s about investing in companies that are...

Why the Fly-Over States are Worth More than a Downward Glance

Intuitively we all know innovation is deflationary. Today, you probably wouldn’t spend more than $100 on a terabyte of digital storage. Not that long ago, some companies were fitting entire floors of office buildings and spending a...

COVID-19: A FOCUS ON FUNDAMENTALS

COVID-19 has us questioning what a “new normal” will look like in terms of how we work, travel and invest. It has amplified pre-existing challenges and created new ones.

One key lesson it has taught us across...

Food is Health: How to Access Uncorrelated Growth in 2020

“Food is Health” has driven the iSelect investment process since our start in 2014. Americans spend more than $1.5T each year on food and almost $2T on diet-related illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, obesity and type 2...

Where Does Health Start? In the Ground

Healthy soil is literally the foundation for a healthy food system and is a leading indicator for many key metrics around sustainability and ecological health. As a result, soil health is inextricably linked to plant, animal, human...

What Will COVID-19 Mean for the Future of Healthcare?

While there is very little good to be said about the ongoing COVID-19 situation, we can only hope that we recover from this pandemic while also making the healthcare and food systems better and stronger than they...

Here’s What’s Coming Next in Cancer Diagnostics

In 2019 over 600,000 people died from cancer in the United States alone. One of the primary drivers behind these high mortality rates for cancer is late diagnosis. For this reason, we're seeing increasing demand for noninvasive...

Therapeutics and Inflammation: What’s Coming Next?

Many of the major medical conditions that we face in our lives share an underlying cause: chronic inflammation.

...

Investing at the Nexus of Food and Health

Almost three years ago, iSelect strategically refocused its investment thesis on identifying the synergies between food and healthcare. At the time, food and healthcare were two completely independent, siloed verticals. But, the fact is, the more that...

Propagate Ventures: Planting New Revenue Streams for Farmers

As a company dedicated to regenerative agroforestry solutions, Propagate Ventures works with farmers and land managers to design and install tree-crop systems that work in tandem with existing farm operations....

What the Borden Bankruptcy Tells Us About the Future of Food

As a sailor, I learned a long time ago, it is always darkest before the dawn. Borden is bankrupt. And the dawn is coming.
...

Innovation, Inflation and the New Digital Economy

A decade ago, the U.S. economy was in a bad place.

Still reeling from the financial crisis, 2009 saw ultra-low interest rates and the expectation that years of recovery would call for rates beyond 4% by 2020.
...

What Researchers are Learning About the Biome Might Just Save Your Life… or Kill You

Over Thanksgiving I overheard some parents talking about their children and dating. Apparently some young adults are now using 23andMe to determine compatibility before a date becomes a serious relationship. The parents mentioned an attempt to sneak...

How Blood-Based Diagnostics are Changing Cancer Care

iSelect hosts a Deep Dive webinar on a novel innovation topic on the first and third Wednesdays of each month at 9 a.m. central. Our most recent session focused on early cancer diagnosis using blood-based tools. Testing...

Creating a Food System That Works (for Everyone)

Innovation is what drives prices down. That's why we have TVs and computers that are both incredibly powerful and affordable, and why we have healthcare that is incredibly unaffordable.

If food prices had risen at the...

Why Bioavailability is Becoming the Next Buzzword in Agriculture

iSelect hosts a Deep Dive webinar on a novel innovation topic on the first and third Wednesdays of each month at 9 a.m. central. Our most recent session focused on bioavailability. By improving the bioavailability...

Why We Created iSelect

The purpose behind what we do at iSelect is simple: we help investors and create great companies. When we started this organization, it was in reaction to a market opportunity that we saw -- the disconnect between...

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Consideration

With 2021 well underway and with public markets still strong, we think it is an important time to highlight some of the key private market, venture investment themes that iSelect fund has identified for the year. We believe technologies transforming the Agriculture, Food and Wellness markets will flourish, with a focus on four areas: technologies that enable better food choices to drive better health outcomes, technologies that drive better, more profitable farm operations, technologies that drive the Consumerization of Healthcare, and biome-based treatment technologies. At iSelect, we invest for impact AND performance. We offer qualified investors access to emerging growth companies through our national venture capital strategy. Our unique structure allows our investors to continue to invest in these companies as they develop.

Timing

Why is now the right time for venture? The answer is that now is not explicitly the right time. Venture is something we need in our economy at all times. Now is not better than any other particular time. The question is, why ever stop? When we look at the challenges we’re facing in food and healthcare the reality is there is someone, somewhere who has an insight about how to build a product that will solve those problems. And if they put the right resources to it, they will succeed. As long as we need new technology to make life better or make our lives more enjoyable, we need venture capital to help fuel those entrepreneurs.

What is iSelect as a product?

iSelect is a very unique product, but when you break it into its parts it’s fairly easy to understand. On the front end we’re a traditional venture capital fund. We have a diligence process. We have an investment process. We have categories of industries where we have focus and real expertise, and we invest in companies in those areas that meet requirements for the fund. On the back end we’re unique in that we don’t raise a large amount of capital at one time and deploy it over the life of our fund. Each deal that we bring onto the fund, our investors have to prove and determine to invest in that deal. We have to constantly prove our diligence standards. It’s accessible, transparent and easy for investors to come in and see our comprehensive process.

What is the ideal iSelect company?

We are looking for founders that are passionate and we want the problem they’re trying to solve to be big, real, and painful. We want the solution to be revolutionary and we want our capital to be able to help them solve that problem. We want to know that they have customers involved and that the solution they’ve come up with actually meets those customers’ and market needs. And we want the team to be capital efficient with the money they’re spending.

What does the ideal iSelect company look like?

We’re looking for a company that has an opportunity to have a 10x return to our investment or greater in a period of three to seven years. What excites us at iSelect are companies that are solving big problems. We want companies that are going to be the Monsantos of the future. Not just in the size and the scope, but the impact they have on people’s lives. We want to create positive impacts on people’s lives, so we invest in areas like agricultural production and areas like producing healthy foods for our kids. They are problems that impact real people’s lives on a daily basis. That’s what we’re trying to do at iSelect. We’re trying to solve the big problems out there. Find ways to bring capital to the entrepreneurs who are the real heroes out there getting up every morning, beating away at these things that are problems that you and me and everyone else faces in their everyday lives.

What is iSelect?

iSelect is a venture capital firm. What that means is we look at hundreds and hundreds of different companies and we apply tough diligence standards to each of them, looking at whether the team has a good plan for growing the business, whether the team is qualified and credible, and more. We do that to resolve the few who provide the best opportunities for investors. And then iSelect takes that smaller set of investments and goes to investors who are interested in venture capital and provides a way for them to invest in these companies, either individually or all at once. We co-invest alongside other venture capitalists. We source transactions through to an exit where the company would become public or get bought. And we manage that whole investment process on behalf of our investors.