Healthcare

Resistant Hypertension: Ending the Death Sentence

Physicians have been fascinated with blood and the circulatory system for hundreds of years. Records dating back to early Roman times prove that bloodletting was in wide use as a treatment for disease at least 2,000 years ago, and leeches have been used in medicine for more than 2,500 years, dating back to a period...

Cofactor Genomics: RNA Is About to Make Personalized Medicine a Reality

By David Messina, PhD

This is an amazing time to be in biology.

In fact, I like to say that right now we’re in a place that’s a lot like where personal computers were in 1987. In those days, PCs were pretty limited in what they could do. They still ran off of floppy disks,...

Immunophotonics, SAKK Move Forward with Research Collaboration

Cancer care is entering a new age, transitioning from treatments that attack both cancerous and healthy cells at the same time, to more targeted, specialized therapies that address the root cause of cancer itself without damaging surrounding tissues. Biotech company Immunophotonics is working on one such treatment, developing a proprietary drug for use in a...

Gila Therapeutics: New Solutions for the Obesity Crisis

Obesity is the single largest health crisis facing the world today. More than one billion people worldwide are overweight or obese, accounting for 38% of the population. In the U.S., a full 68% of adults, or some 200 million people, are overweight. On average, obese individuals pay $2,000 more per year for medical...

House Calls Are Back: How Epharmix Is Revolutionizing Healthcare

There is massive consolidation occurring in the healthcare space right now, and as a result hospital systems are acting almost like private equity groups. They're sucking up all of these once-independent primary care providers and are distributing all of the administrative functions that these providers manager to shared, centralized care teams in an effort to...

John Talley Turns His Attention to Cancer Therapy

For Euclises, it’s simple.

Without the work of John Talley, Ph.D., the world would not have Celebrex®, the blockbuster arthritis...

Expensive EpiPens Aren’t the Problem, Barriers to Innovation Are

There’s been a lot of talk this week about the EpiPen, and for good reason.

First developed in the 1970s, the EpiPen is a medical device that automatically injects a measured dose of adrenaline into the bloodstream, allowing for easy field treatment of allergic reactions. It’s near ubiquitous in schools, offices, airports and anywhere else...

Jon Snyder: An American Entrepreneur

It was 2008, and Jon Snyder wasn’t happy.

He had spent 25 years building a career in medical device sales, specializing in products that used neurostimulation to help patients with a variety of conditions manage chronic pain. He had worked all over the world as a biomedical executive, had a fantastic job in Chicago, and...

Indalo Targets Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis

Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis is a highly progressive and life threatening disease affects approximately 130,000 people in the United States. It’s worse than many cancers. According to the National Institute of Health, physicians are unsure of the cause, but the prognosis is well-established. Affected patients have a median life expectancy of about four years. St....

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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.