Imagine having 20 million contactable experts on call. This is what Cambridge Angels portfolio company Techspert offers the healthcare market. In this interview, CEO of Techspert, Dave Holden talks about his entrepreneurial journey, and offers his top funding tips to other founders.
1. Could you tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to starting Techspert? [Eg What is your relevant experience and what made you become an entrepreneur]
Following a masters in Biochemistry at Oxford, I worked as a trainee Patent Attorney in the Biotechnology field in London.
I enjoyed being close to the core of innovation but felt often the service we were providing was hindering the innovation process rather than accelerating it.
I wanted to have a more entrepreneurial role and went to Cambridge University to study for a Masters in Bioscience Enterprise, which lead me to a role corporate development role in a diagnostics start-up, Psyomics.
During this role, I experienced the pain points of gaining access to the right insights. Expert insight is crucial when trying to make complex product and go-to-market decisions, but it took me weeks to connect with people who were even vaguely relevant to the markets we wanted to sell into.
This experience lead me to set up Techspert (Biotechspert as it was then). I wanted to develop a platform could map in real time exactly who has what expertise in the healthcare sector and therefore connect businesses to exactly the right expertise. I knew the information was out there online, that experts were willing to be paid for these calls, and that there was a unmet need from corporates and investors alike. I underestimated however, how hard it would be however to get to the scale we are today.
2. What is the big problem that Techspert is tackling and how does it do it?
The big problem is getting fast access to experts and insights in the healthcare sector. It takes Billions of dollars and often decades to get products from discovery to market in our sector and wrong turns during the process are extremely costly. The reason we exist is to have a positive impact on this process by connecting the right people together in the healthcare sector. For example, our clients needed to roll out vaccines in Uganda and used our platform to connect with specific healthcare professionals on the ground.
We solve the expertise and insights bottlenecks by ingesting large quantities of data to map healthcare experts globally. We cover over 20 million contactable experts, with 430 thousand engaged on our platform. This enables us to deliver industry-leading quality of match, and unique experts that can't be found anywhere else.
Our customers, including consultancies, biotechs, investors and marketing firms use our platform to complete calls and surveys with experts, but generative AI now enables us to take this to the next level. In addition, our customers can now query previous calls and groups of calls in real time within the chat interface in our product. This means we are moving up the value chain, on our mission to become the worlds leading platform for Heathcare primary research.
3. This sounds like a competitive space so how does your approach differ from others?
Our competitors rely on two main methodologies for finding experts (i) curated databases (ii) linkedin. Both these sources require manual input and extensive human resources for either data entry or recruitment on linkedin.
Our technology takes a completely different approach, ingesting data automatically across millions of experts and combining it to predict expertise and deliver precisely matched experts across the sector. Unlike other networks, we can therefore reach untapped frontline professionals. 1 in 3 of the experts we serve is unique to us this is one of the key reasons our customers come back to us year after year.
Our approach also means we can automate much more of the process, delivering greater speeds, efficiency, and convenience. Our platform is also very feature rich, including many AI features that extract insights from calls and serve them to our customers instantly, within the platform, saving them many hours across their research projects.
4.What has your funding been to date and do you have a couple of fundraising tips for aspiring entrepreneurs?
We have raised a number (too many) rounds over the years. Including crowd funding, angel funding and VC.
My first tip/question in relation to funding, is do you need to do it? If there is a way you can get more cash faster from your customers and therefore reduce the funding and dilution you need to take on, then that should be number one priority in my opinion and is the best and cheapest form of financing for growth. If I could go back in time this is something I would change with how we have grown - to be more capital efficient and improve our margins and cashflows earlier, rather than prioritising growth of revenue and the team.
Make sure your time horizons and exit thoughts line up with investors you bring on. It is tempting to say what many VCs want to hear at this point 'that you want the business to get to unicorn scale within the coming years etc', but if this isn't truly what you see as the best and most achievable route for the business to succeed then it could cause issues further down the line. There are investors who have different fund dynamics where a lower risk routes to profitability are also viable if that fits with your personal ambitions as a founder. Other than that. VCs care about the scale of the opportunity you are aiming for, and how likely you are to get there. So try to paint a clear picture of the end destination and how exciting and lucrative it is, while also backing it up with evidence and metrics that prove you are heading in that direction. Also try to lean into your personal strengths as a founder, whether that is product, sales, marketing or finance, and show awareness of that, so that you can bring your personal passion and conviction out effectively during the process.
5.How did backing from Cambridge Angels help you?
Cambridge Angels were instrumental in our first £1m round. Simon Thorpe has been supportive of the business throughout, given great advice throughout the journey, and opened doors to other investors along the way. There is a lot of experience in the group that yields great suggestions on investor calls, many of which have been implemented to great effect.
