5 questions...An interview with Techspert CEO, Dave Holden

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. 

5 questions... An interview with Concr's CEO, Irina Babina

How does Astrophysics help eliminate the trial-and-error approach to cancer care? Hear from Concr's newly appointed CEO Irina Babina, who has shared her experience and Concr's exciting progress in this 5 question interview.

· Congratulations on taking over as CEO of Concr. Could you give us a bit about your background and how you came to the business?

Of course. I’ve always worked in life sciences and started with building my own research in oncogenic addiction of aggressive breast and gastric cancers. After 10 years in academia, I moved into funding management, helping other scientists to develop their ideas. During that time, I completed an MBA and then moved fully into commercial side of science, as a VC and a life sciences consultant.

That’s when I got involved with Concr, initially as a strategy consultant and later became a part-time Head of Strategy. What really appealed to me was their adoption of existing and proven engineering methods to address challenges in medicine. I’m a huge advocate for convergence science and leveraging knowledge from other fields. My involvement with the company kept growing, and I eventually joined the management team and succeeded our founder-CEO in January.

· What is the problem that Concr is tackling and how does it do it?

Concr is on a mission to eliminate trial-and-error approach to cancer care. Despite all the tremendous collective research effort in cancer, patients’ benefit remains disproportionately marginal. We need better tools to select patients for existing and emerging treatments, for which we need to better understand the biology of response and resistance to these therapies. This is where Concr technology can really help move the needle.

To capture the complexity of biology and factor-in our limited knowledge of it, Concr adopted computational modelling methods from astrophysics, which allows cosmologists to simultaneously integrate enormous amounts of complex and fragmented data to model the universe. Concr adapted these Bayesian methods to integrate the diverse and disparate data gathered over decades of cancer research and clinical treatment to model human disease biology.

We use it to examine complex – typically, molecular – data to define characteristics of patients and their cancers that are associated with response and resistance to existing or emerging therapies. Importantly, we can do it at an individual- and cohort-level, which hasn’t been done before.

· Where are you in the development of the platform and what commercial traction do you have?

Most of our work currently is with biotech and pharma looking to reduce uncertainty in drug development and increase probability of success of their drug assets, although we’re beginning to get some interest from healthcare providers, given that we can make predictions for an individual.

Having delivered our first commercial projects last year, we now refined and productised our offers and built the infrastructure for rapid project set up and delivery. Furthermore, we completed beta version of FarrSight® - our cloud native software that allows interaction with the results of our predictive analytics, as well as contains self-service bioinformatics tools.

At this point, we’ve negotiated additional commercial contracts and have a rich pipeline of promising leads across the drug development supply chain. Full launch of FarrSight® is planned for June this year.

· This sounds like a competitive space so how does your approach differ from others?

You’re right, it could be difficult to differentiate all the AI/ML offers currently on the market, and I see it as a positive: this is a new and rapidly growing sector with much promise. What sets Concr apart is our positioning, our technological differentiation and validation studies across biological and clinical datasets.

For starters, Concr is not a drug discovery platform, which so many current offers focus on. We focus on predicting therapeutic response for an individual patient through in-depth understanding of the underlying biology.

What allows us to do it so effectively is the astrophysics technological backbone. It solves the challenges of integrating and learning from fragmented and diverse biological datasets, from preclinical research to patient clinical data, yielding most sophisticated scalable digital models of human disease biology. Consequently, it minimises reliance on “big data” – we can make accurate predictions with a fraction of data needed by conventional ML methods. This is particularly important in cases where research data is limited, for example if a drug asset is early in development or if it’s a rare cancer.

Of course, the only way to know if something is working is through results. We have case studies demonstrating technical, biological and clinical validation of our predictions, generated through collaborations and commercial work. We’ve just released a paper describing our approach to in silico trial predictions, which was validated in 8 historical clinical trials. Last month we launched our first prospective clinical validation study in early triple-negative breast cancer, which will test clinical utility of our platform.

· What has your funding being to date and what are your funding plans for the future?

We are fortunate to be backed by exceptional financial supporters, a testament to the groundwork laid by our former CEO, Matt Foster. Early on, our core technology was developed through our collaboration with Roche and supported by an Innovate UK grant. Securing this grant required us to demonstrate financial stability, and thanks to a swift £200K investment from Cambridge Angels, we achieved this in just two weeks.

Last year we closed a £1.94m oversubscribed seed round, including follow-on investments as well as new institutional investors, which allowed us to complete initial validation studies, secure additional contracts, and enabled us to secure another non-dilutive grant for clinical validation.

These achievements strategically position us for our imminent Series A round, a significant milestone we are about to officially embark on. This pivotal fundraise will support our commercial growth, scale business operations and allow for further improvement and refinement of our technology.

5 questions...An interview with Kalium Health CEO, Tom Collings

Tom Collings is CEO and co-founder of Kalium Health, working to transform the management of cardiorenal diseases using our real-time blood monitoring technology.

What is your background and how did this lead you to starting Kalium Health?

I qualified as a Mechanical Engineer and I’m a builder at heart. My career started with building product prototypes in a workshop, from which I learnt how to design better products. From there I found myself managing complex, high-value medical technology development projects. Now I’m building a team and a company, so the building never stops!

Kalium Health was started in 2018 when a doctor at Addenbrooke’s Hospital spotted an unmet clinical need and teamed up with two researchers from Cambridge University to develop a solution. I volunteered my capabilities and the four of us together realised the huge potential. It’s truly a result of the powerful cocktail of ideas, talent and funding that makes Cambridge one of the best places in the world to start a technology business.

Where is the company now and what are your goals for it over the next 24 months?

It’s such an exciting time for us. We have developed the world’s first test for blood potassium levels that is rapid, accurate and suitable for home use. This is poised to change the way that cardiorenal diseases are managed, enabling real-time health monitoring so that medications can be prescribed more safely and patients can stay healthy outside the hospital.

We’re busy completing our clinical testing and getting regulatory approvals so that we can release our first product onto the market and begin working on our next ideas.

What do you wish you'd known before starting on your entrepreneurial journey?

People do business with people, not companies. Before founding Kalium Health I thought I had a great network… turns out I had to develop a whole different network of mentors, advisers, investors and other founders who have ‘been there, done that’. Everyone I meet is so generous with their time and I try to do the same.

What specific challenges did you have during fundraising (and how did you overcome them)?

As a team of mostly technical, first-time founders we had to learn to stop pitching the product and start pitching the business. I spent a year full-time raising our first equity funding and it was through countless meetings with experienced investors that I learnt the ingredients for a successful business. Now we’re putting that into practice and we will shortly close our third funding round.

How has having Cambridge Angels in your investor group helped you?

Cambridge Angels bring such a positive approach, undoubtedly due to the entrepreneurial success of the members who are better qualified than most to balance risk and opportunity. Their advice has helped me focus on the things that will really move the needle. Also, as a majority-female founding team we are delighted to have backing from several female Angels including Pam Garside, current Chair of Cambridge Angels and a super-connector in the UK/US healthcare space.

5 questions... An interview with Qureight's CEO, Muhunthan Thillai

In this “5 questions….” interview, their fantastic CEO, Muhunthan Thillai, talks about what Qureight does, his aims for the company in the future and some tips for fundraising and first-time CEOs.

1. Tell us a bit about yourself and Qureight?

I am a respiratory doctor at the hospitals in Cambridge and co-founder and CEO of Qureight. We founded the company a few years ago out of the Accelerator at the Judge Business School. We wanted to solve the problem of potential blockbuster drugs in lung and heart diseases failing during the clinical trial process. Qureight has built a software platform which uses real-world data and machine learning tools to create products to help clinical trials and we've had some great traction recently signing a number of commercial deals with biopharma companies both in Europe and the US.

2. Where are you aiming Qureight to be in 5 years?

In five years I want Qureight to be the largest data platform in the world running multiple clinical trials in lung and heart diseases. Our ambition is for the platform to be fully integrated with global biopharma companies, hospitals and contract research organisations and to use a variety of machine learning based products to help our clients get the best drugs to market faster. All of this is to help patients with these diseases get access to cutting edge treatments.

3. Can you give an example of a recent challenge you have had to navigate as a CEO?

We recently completed a contracting process with a client which was very complicated due to the nature of the trial they wanted to run on the platform. The contract went back and forth several times and the client (whilst well meaning) kept trying to push down the costs. For any start up this is a challenge that many of us at leadership face. We sometimes have to make a decision to would walk away from a deal rather than cut corners. In this particular case the client was happy to complete signing and start the work. It was a really important lesson for me that as we scale, we of course have to hustle for every deal, but at some point we have to have a benchmark that we stick to if we are to grow as a company.

4. Do you have a couple of fundraising tips for entrepreneurs in the medtech space?

I think the first point would be to always follow the science. In medtech most companies at the early stage will not have recurring revenue and many of the contracts they sign may be small pilots but it's really important to focus on the technology itself and use that to explain the true value of the company that you're building for future growth. Another point is to find the right investors. The fund raising environment is difficult at the moment but if you are lucky enough to get more than one investor, it's really important to work out who you want to grow with over the next few years rather than just accepting the first term sheet that comes your way.

5. How has having Cambridge Angels in your investor group assisted you?

The Cambridge Angels have been fantastically supportive. We have five on our cap table and they all come with different skills. Rather than naming all of them, the one person I would single out is Simon Thorpe who invested in our very first pre seed around three years ago and is a great person to get advice from in terms of company strategy and direction. The angels as a group have a number of events for networking and introductions to both investors and the wider ecosystem and we're very fortunate that some of them have backed us at the early stages of our company.