This article showcases Startup Pill’s top picks for the best Therapeutics startups. These startups are taking a variety of approaches to innovating inside of the Therapeutics industry and around the world. They are all exceptional startups well worth a follow.
We tried to pick companies across the size spectrum from cutting edge startups to established brands.
We selected these startups for exceptional performance in one of these categories:
The goal of the 2021 Lyfebulb-CSL Behring Innovation Challenge: Thriving with Transplantation is to source innovative solutions to improve outcomes and experiences for all those affected by transplantation.
The Innovation Challenge will take place virtually in May 2021 and is currently accepting applications through February 19, 2021. Patient entrepreneurs – those who have been affected by chronic disease as either a patient or support partner for a loved one and started a company to develop solutions to an unmet need identified in their disease journey – are encouraged to apply.
Selected finalists will receive an invitation to pitch their company’s solutions to an expert panel of judges comprised of healthcare industry, medical and patient leaders. One winner will be awarded a $25,000 monetary grant. Competing finalists may be considered for possible partnerships or investments beyond the challenge. Beyond presenting their innovative ventures, the finalists will have the opportunity to exchange ideas on how to further advance patient innovation in the transplant community; engage with Lyfebulb founders, CSL Behring leadership leadership, representatives from the patient community, key opinion leaders and potential investors; and share insights with each other.
The Lyfebulb-CSL Behring Innovation Challenge stems from the idea of the Lyfebulb Entrepreneur Circle, established in 2015, and features individuals who have created a product and a company based on the issues encountered due to their personal experiences with a chronic illness (through their own diagnosis or that of a loved one).
Oxford Medical Products (OMP) has raised £1.2M in seed investment to develop a safe and affordable weight loss capsule, which uses the same mechanism of action as a gastric balloon, but can be taken at home. The funding will be used to complete pre-clinical testing, upscale and outsource manufacturing and grow the team. The funding was led by Ada Ventures with Selvedge Venture alongside several angel investors including Dr Nick Edwards, a founder of the company, and Dr Jan Hruska, co-founder of Sophos.
Oxford Medical Products (OMP) has raised €1.3 million to develop a safe and affordable weight loss capsule, which uses the same mechanism of action as a gastric balloon, but can be taken at home. The funding will be used to complete pre-clinical testing, upscale and outsource manufacturing and develop the company’s workforce.
The company’s non-surgical weight loss technology Sirona, is a self-expanding hydrogel capsule that once swallowed expands in the stomach, reducing hunger and, the company claims, leading to significant weight loss. The capsules stay in the stomach for several weeks before breaking down gradually and passing naturally over time.
Oxford Medical Products was founded in 2017 by Professor Jan Czenurska a world-renowned expert in hydrogels, and Dr Hutan Ashrafian a pioneering bariatric surgeon – with Dr Camilla Easter and Dr Nick Edwards, two medically trained entrepreneurs, joining Oxford Medical Products soon after.
Singapore-based healthtech startup Mesh Bio has raised $1.8 million (SGD2.4 million) in Seed funding, led by deep tech investors Elev8.vc and Enterprise Singapore’s investment arm Seeds Capital, along with Citrine Capital and Tael Partners.
The funds will be used to accelerate the rollout of Mesh Bio’s solution, DARA® – a predictive analytics and clinical workflow automation solution for healthcare providers – in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. The funding will also support clinical partnerships and collaborations.
Mesh Bio, a Singaporean health-tech startup, has raised US$1.8 million in a seed funding round, led by deep-tech investor Elev8.vc and SEEDS capital.
Wealth management firm Citrine Capital as well as Singaporean VC firm Tael Partners also joined the round.
Mesh Bio intends to use the capital to accelerate the rollout of its solution, DARA, for healthcare providers in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. The funds will also support the startup’s clinical partnerships and collaborations.
Mesh Bio intends to expand its solution further across Southeast Asia and Hong Kong.
Your brain, with a USB-C port in it. That’s Elon Musk’s vision for Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI). In a controversial July 2019 white paper he claimed that his company Neuralink had taken a huge step towards building a “scalable high-bandwidth BMI system” that would let the human brain “stream full broadband electrophysiology data” to a network, using a combination of ultra-fine polymer probes, a neurosurgical robot that sews them into the brain, and custom high-density electronics.
Amidst the global lockdowns and coronavirus precautions, Entrepreneur Firstopted to reveal their latest European cohort virtually, through pre-recorded pitch videos.
Investor and media demand clearly was high for the 13th European cohort’s reveal, as the dedicated website for the online demo day initially crashed due to too much traffic at its 1 p.m. launch time. But after some wrangling behind-the-scenes, the teams from London, Berlin and Paris were on show for the first time.
EF was founded in 2011 by Alice Bentinck and Matt Clifford, and is well-known for their non-traditional approach to the entrepreneurial path. Instead of selecting companies with existing business ideas for their cohorts, individuals are chosen based on their technical and business talent, and EF works with them to create high-growth startups from scratch.
The focus has shifted over the last two years, with synthetic biology startups emerging amongst the AI and machine learning companies. As Clifford puts it: “We’re increasingly seeing that the world’s most talented and ambitious people are motivated to solve huge problems in the [life science] space, and we are hitting an inflection point where the barriers to entry to building a breakout biotech company are dramatically reducing.”
Some of the life science focuses include animal-free dairy, gene therapies for treating donor livers, genetic information capturing and digital twins of cells to accelerate drug discovery.
With the spotlight shifting somewhat towards life sciences at EF still being a relatively new approach, it will be intriguing to see how their talent-first method fares in this rapidly accelerating market; building successful biotech companies is, after all, no mean feat.
Y Combinator’s Demo Day was a bit different this time around.
As concerns grew over the spread of COVID-19, Y Combinator shifted the event format away from the two-day gathering in San Francisco we’ve gotten used to, instead opting to have its entire class debut to invited investors and media via YC’s Demo Day website.
In a bit of a surprise twist, YC also moved Demo Day forward one week citing accelerated pacing from investors. Alas, this meant switching up its plan for each company to have a recorded pitch on the Demo Day website; instead, each company pitched via slides, a few paragraphs outlining what they’re doing and the traction they’re seeing, and team bios. It’s unclear so far how this new format — in combination with the rapidly evolving investment climate — will impact this class.
As we do with each class, we’ve collected our notes on each company based on information gathered from their pitches, websites and, in some cases, our earlier coverage of them.