Tech4Eva’s Basel Roadshow Recap

At the Tech4Eva Basel Roadshow in partnership with DayOne, the Healthcare Innovation initiative powered byBasel Area Business & Innovation, we connected with investors, experts, and leaders in the healthcare field once again. We heard insights about the digital health trends in Switzerland from PwC, pitches from Tech4Eva’s growth start-up and listened to an interesting panel on: “Corporate Collaboration with Start-ups” and a fireside chat about the “Journey of Fundraising”.

Some key highlights of PWC’s survey*: «How to develop and commercialize digital health solutions”

·      Companies shift the focus to more regulated solutions

·      Reimbursement is a key driver for future business models

·      Internal funding options will remain important

·      Companies are still on the way to fully leverage data

Panel Discussion: "Corporate Collaboration with Start-ups”, interesting highlights from each speaker:

Jane Sagui, Co-Founder of Pollie

Pollie is a woman's health start-up which is hyper focused on helping women with polycystic ovary syndrome or PCOS. Their product is an app for PCOS to help manage their symptoms in the day-to-day between doctor's appointment. They made a partnership with Bayer G4A in 2021, which helps them to have a more automated product, to have more exposure and to be efficient as a team.

Sophie Park, Managing Director of Bayer G4A

At Bayer G4A, they have been supporting and scaling start-ups or digital health companies, such as Pollie within the global ecosystem for over a decade now. “I continuously say that in order to fix the system that has so many different players in it, we can't lose sight of what we are trying to do and what kind of products we are trying to build.”

Alberto Tomatis, Digital InnovationLAB Director of Roche

The InnovationLAB is a unit that aims to foster regional innovation within organizations by matching challenges that they currently have with the ecosystem. Their focus is on woman's self in ophthalmology and neuroscience. As an innovation lab, they are active in the puzzle of the Swiss innovation ecosystem and what is great in working with start-ups for him, is the diverse type of CEOs, from the healthcare sector obviously, but also from completely different areas.

Juan Pablo Segura, Co-Founder & President of Babyscript

Partnership has really been a core part of their DNA. Thanks to all the partnerships they did such as with Roche, they have created the largest clinical network in the country leveraging remote patient monitoring for obstetrical care and pregnancy care. They monitor about 7% of the US patient population. Furthermore, they work with more than 80 health systems across 34 different States.

Rob Scott, Global Head of Product & Network of Novartis Biome

Novartis Biome is a network of innovation hubs to democratize access to tech innovation and expertise. Rob takes care of Novartis Biome partnerships with start-ups. Question asked to Rob: “Why do things fail and what do you think is the key to know why things fail?” For him, “partnerships or specific programs don’t succeed or get scaled because they are not able to get incredible evidence early enough to get in front of the healthcare system.”

Fireside Chat - b-RayZ, The Journey of Fundraising

About b-rayZ

At b-rayZ, they have the ambition of building a digital space for healthcare professionals and patients supporting the diagnosis and care of breast cancer. They use artificial intelligence as a core technology; the idea is to create service that reduce human errors in the early diagnosis of breast cancer but also reduce cost in providing services related to the diagnosis of breast cancer and allows the development of personalized strategies for the single patient. They already have the first product of the portfolio for the early diagnosis. They are in European countries’ market and have started with the new markets in the Middle East and just closed an investment round in July of CHF4M to continue the product development and scale.

Fundraising Experience

For Cristina and her team, it was an opportunity to learn a lot about the way of raising money, as they had a university background and so didn’t have any experience in business.

Furthermore, it took more time than planned to raise non-dilutive funds. In fact, they did some errors for example, approaching investors who were not fitting for the stage where the company was, so they were expecting a much lower valuation of the company which was not acceptable for them. However, making mistakes is how everyone learn and that’s the also the case for them because it helps them getting prepared for approaching the right investors. Another key benefit of fundraising was to push Cristina out of her comfort zone: she had to use not only her scientific intelligence but also her social intelligence, so this helps her to take her out from the body of scientist and learning to ask for money.

The superpower of Switzerland for digital health start-ups

Cristina said: "Switzerland is the perfect place for digital application in the healthcare system because they already have a market which is well educated, and they have extensive healthcare professional’s resources available. Furthermore, as the country invests in different solutions that support start-ups, such agencies like Innosuisse or the Tech4Eva’s incubator, Switzerland offers a very important network for the companies. The only negative points about the healthcare system in Switzerland is the missing regulation for digital application and the missing mutual recognition agreement with the European Union."

*When the survey will be available, Tech4Eva will share it

Watch the whole session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mqx81X2_T20