Blue Insights #3
First and Foremost?
Being an entrepreneur is really rewarding and allow you to make?the impossible possible.
Ferrari returns after a 50-year absence from the 24H du Mans and wins the centenary edition, while Cadillac takes 3rd?and 4th?place after a 21-year absence! The impossible is possible when you want it!
I've been involved in M&A and healthcare financing in Europe and the USA for over 15 years with Cegedim, so why not create an Corporate finance boutique? Yes, but here's the thing there is a little voice in your head telling you that you will fail. The friends and family who say you're talented, but you know it's not that simple!
In January, I decided to reject my fears and wake up. So, three months ago, I set up Blueballoon Capital . It's still early days, but the foundations are there. The status of Alberto Giacometti's Walking Man inspires and energizes me every day. I feel happy every day I go to MY office. Of course, there are bad days like for everybody, but I feel different because I am aligned with my purpose.?
Being an entrepreneur means that you believe that the impossible is possible. You need to be enthusiastic but not euphoric. If you have a clear vision for your business, are determined to last for decades, ready to go beyond the wall and are providing a real solution to your customers' problems, then don't worry, you're on the right track. The most important starting point? Getting started!
Now, it's true that sourcing deals is more complicated and time-consuming than expected. But I've learned more than at any time since university. My brain opened. I have met some fantastic people, in France, United States, Turkey, Canada, Serbia, Romania, Poland, the United Kingdom, Germany, Singapore, Israel…
I am much more productive now, even if I have to learn 100 different jobs (marketing, webmaster, IT engineer, travel agent…). I am much more productive because I have the flexibility of working when I want, I can choose my subject, and above all I work for myself, and I can immediately see the impact on my P&L. And that motivates me. As a result, I work more and much better! As a consequent my overall life improved. I paid so much attention to what was right for me that I felt a ripple effect in other areas of my life.
In this third newsletter, you will discover that Women receive incorrect or delayed diagnoses and less effective treatments than men. A brunch of startup is trying to fix the problem, but even if the road is long, it's promising. In this context, I have highlighted three startups founded or co-founded by women. Statistically, startups founded by women are 2.5 times more profitable than those founded by men.
Along with finance and law, healthcare is one of the three most popular sectors for research into generative AI. McKinsey forecast that AI will add up to $4.4 Trillion in value to the economy. Google launch Med-PalM2 in beta test that can answerer complex medical questions. Nuance released a speech recognition software based on AI that generate note automatically during appointment. AI can also help improve eye disease detection and accelerate the diagnosis for rare disease. And finally, AI has the potential to revolutionize the drug discovery process. Learn more below.
If you are ready to start your own venture, look at our?Top insights from the financial market?where we focus on what bear in mind when raising funds.
If you need help setting up or expanding a business. Give us a call and, by seeing beyond the limits and thinking outside the box, we'll make the impossible possible.
I dedicate this newsletter to my beloved Isabelle, who has made sacrifices to put the kids to bed alone and take on more than half the work at home. And despite the burden she carries, she often looks me in the eye during difficult times and says "I believe in you". And that belief alone has given me the strength to go for it.
Enjoy the last days of spring!
The gender health gap
Women receive incorrect or delayed diagnoses and less effective treatments than men. Despite living longer, women spend on average almost a quarter of their lives in poor health, compared with a fifth for men, according to a report from Public Health England.
This is because there isn't enough funding to study women's bodies, both for clinical and basic research, and if there isn't funding, scientists can't work on these issues. Women have been excluded from medical trials due to an erroneous belief that their menstrual cycles might skew results, perceived risks to child-bearing potential and fertility concerns among women in their 20s and 30s, and the increased cost of incorporating another population into medical studies. So to date, researchers have extrapolated that what works for men will work for women -which, to state the obvious, doesn't always work.
For example, the sleeping pill zolpidem in the USA, which, because it is released more slowly in women's bodies than in men's, still has an effect on women the morning after they take their dose. The FDA had to adapt the dosage for women after several high-profile road accidents raised awareness of the problem.
Without data, healthcare professionals are working in the dark. Without data, Ai is useless. On the other hand, Ai could create the data that's missing and help bridge the gender health gap. Other advanced uses of artificial intelligence include a research project that trained algorithms on radiology reports to predict intimate partner violence and injury an average of three years before entry into a violence prevention program. Columbia University is using scarce endometriosis data to develop a machine-learning solution that enables doctors to diagnose the disease earlier.
In the short term, though, closing the gender health gap is a question of money!
VCs are coming to understand the huge absence of information and support -and thus the opportunity.?According to the 2022 "All In: Female Founders in the U.S. VC Ecosystem" report from PitchBook, the number of women general partners in VC firms is rising - climbing from 12% in 2019 to 16.1% in 2022.
To leanr more you can read the Wired article?https://www.wired.co.uk/article/womens-health-care-inequalities?and the book from Sarah Graham?“Rebel Bodies: A guide to the gender health gap revolution”.
If you have a project to improve women's health, please contact us to discuss how we can help you raise funds and/or connect to the right people.
Fundraising in the healthcare sector in May, including 3 startups co-founded by women
Moon Surgical raises €51.4m in Serie B for surgical robots.
Founded in 2019 by Anne Osdoit and @Brice Gayet, Moon Surgical, designs and markets surgical co-manipulation robots for laparoscopy.
Moon Surgical has raised €51.4m in Series B funding from NVentures, Sofinnova Partners, GT Healthcare Capital & Partners, Cathay Health, J&J Innovation, Yann Fleureau, Sacha Loiseau, Siddarth Satish.
TISSIUM ,?raised €50 million in Serie D for?tissue reconstruction
Tissium, founded in 2013 by Maria Pereira and Christophe Bancel , develop biomorphic programmable polymers for tissue reconstruction.
In May 2023, it has closed a Series D round, raising €50 million from Fonds Stratégique des Transitions, managed by ISALT, Merieux Developpement, Cathay Health, Credit Mutuel Innovation and Sofinnova Partners.
In June 15, 2023, Tissium announces it has obtained a non-dilutive financing of €4.2 million from Bpifrance as part of the “France 2030” plan to extend its production capacity for “large volume” syringes.
BrightHeart , AI software focused on the detection of congenital heart defects in fetuses raised €2 million in seed financing
BrightHeart founded in 2022 by Marilyne Levy and Bertrand Stos an artificial intelligence software focused on improving the detection of congenital heart defects in fetuses. BrightHeart's AI-driven software provides real-time guidance to fetal medicine healthcare professionals, to consistently perform high-quality prenatal ultrasounds and inform decisions for optimal pregnancy and delivery management.
BrightHeart has raised €2 million in Seed financing from?Sofinnova Partners.
Faks raises €5 million to digitalize the pharmacie industry.
Company founded in 2020 by Clément Goupy and Corentin Geoffray. Faks develops a platform that enables pharmacies to manage all their after-sales operations with suppliers, from managing promotions to resolving complaints and managing expired products.
In May 2023, Faks raised €5 million in Series A financing from UK funds Connect Ventures, Seedcamp and Cocoa VC, and from the Super Capital platform
领英推荐
Along with finance and law, healthcare is one of the three most popular sectors for research into generative AI.
This technology will enable patients to be better informed and learn more about their illnesses.
For doctors, it will initially relieve them of administrative work. For physician training, generative Ai can simulate scenarios and play the role of virtual patients, offering a unique learning experience. Then, of course, there's everything to improve patient diagnosis and treatment, as well as prevention.
One of the problems with generative AI models is that they can be trained on data that may be biased, and so present results that are only suitable for certain ethnic groups or populations. There's also the issue of health data confidentiality.?
麦肯锡 forecasts that AI will add up to $4.4 Trillion in value to the economy each year and $13.4 trillion in annual value added to the global economy by 2030.
According to McKinsey, generative AI could generate between $1.4 and $13.4 trillion in annual added value to the global economy by 2030, depending on the pace of adoption and regulation. The sectors most likely to benefit from generative AI are those with high data intensity, high demand for creativity or personalization, and low current automation. These include media and entertainment, e-commerce, education,?healthcare, manufacturing and financial services.
Google launches Med-PalM2, an AI tool in beta test to answer complex medical questions.
Med-PaLM 2?use Google’s LLMs, for the medical domain to answer medical questions.?Med-PaLM 2?was the first LLM to perform at an “expert” test-taker level performance on the MedQA dataset of US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE)-style questions, reaching 85%+ accuracy, and it was the first AI system to reach a passing score on the MedMCQA dataset comprising Indian AIIMS and NEET medical examination questions, scoring 72.3%.
Google says that in building Med-PaLM 2, they focused on safety, fairness and assessing unfair bias.
AI for generating automatic notes during patient’s appointment
More than half a million physicians already use voice-to-text programs to speed up tasks. In March, Nuance, a speech recognition company owned by Microsoft, released an updated version of the software that allows medical staff to automatically generate notes during a patient's appointment. It uses ambient Al and OpenAl's GPT-4.
AI-enable early detection to fighting eye disease.
In NHS 10% of all outpatient appointments are related to eye problems. Ophthalmologists are struggling to see and treat all patients, and many are going blind due to delays in diagnosis and treatment. The solution is early detection and treatment.
Technology can help alleviate these difficulties. New eye-scanners called optical coherence tomography (OCI) devices can take really high-resolution images of the retina in a non-invasive way. This is promising, but also presents a challenge. Community optometrists don't always have expertise to analyze OCT scans, so they are currently over-referring patients to eye hospitals.
Al system could analyze OCT scans and assess them for more than 50 retinal diseases, at a level on par with expert ophthalmologists. The aim is to train the algorithm on a diverse set of data to ensure that it works for all patients, regardless of their ethnic origin or clinical environment. Once achieve the algorithm will identify and prioritize people with the worst prognosis in local practices so we can treat them in hospitals and reduce the burden of chronic diseases like AMD.
Rare disease detection: faster diagnosis and better treatment
On average, a rare disease patient has about 67 appointments in 75 months until receiving a correct diagnosis. An AI-based diagnostic assistance system can drastically reduce this time.?
The Ai systeme could be based on the Newborn Genomes Programme, launched in December 2022 by Genomics England. This is a research project which aims to use whole-genome sequencing in newborn babies.
According to Nicola Blackwood, chair of Genomics England, about 70 per cent of rare disease patients are children; 30 per cent of them die before the age of five. "If you're waiting five years to get a diagnosis, you'll remain undiagnosed," Blackwood says. "We're hoping to cut that by not only having the diagnostics within the system, but also making our dataset available for researchers to bring better therapeutics and diagnostics back into the clinical care."
AI has the potential to revolutionize the drug discovery process
The pharmaceutical industry is under increasing pressure, with rising costs of research and development (R&D) eroding profit margins. The entire process of developing a drug from preclinical research to marketing can take 12–18 years and often costs between $2.0–3.0B, with only about 10% of candidates successfully completing clinical trials and gaining regulatory approval. AI has the potential to transform drug discovery by rapidly accelerating the R&D timeline, making drug development cheaper and faster and improving the probability of approval. AI can also increase the effectiveness of drug repurposing research. Almost 100 partnerships have been identified between AI vendors and Big Pharma companies since 2015, with increasing numbers witnessed in recent years. GlobalData analysis shows that there were four partnerships for AI-based drug discovery forged by Big Pharma in 2015. In 2020, 27 partnerships in this field were identified, an increase of 575% in just six years.
However, the successful application of AI is dependent on the availability of high-quality data, the addressing of ethical concerns, and the recognition of the limitations of AI-based approaches.
Top insights from the financial market
What should I bear in mind when raising funds?
The five ways to fund your startup:
When looking for a bank loan you will need a funding proposal. The funding proposal will answer the following basic points:
Why do you need the money?
When looking for a fundraising VC will attentive look at the:?
All this point must be addressed in one way or another in the pitch deck that need to include a proper business model and business plan. Once the pitch deck is ready, work on all the possible objections, you must be prepared to respond to all business and financial questions.
The ultimate goal of a perfect pitch deck is to avoid a “No” and get a “Yes” or at least move from a “Maybe” to a “Yes”.
But the first and more important rule for a successful fundraising is to stay focus. Know what you want and why.
An advisory firm like Blueballoon Capital can help you on all this topic.
Startup founded by woman tend to be more profitable.?
For every dollar received by venture capital funding 78 cents are generate by startup founded by women compared to 31 cents for startup founded by men.
Source: Bank of America Advantage 2022 Woman and Minority Business Owner Spotlight.
If you're planning to set up a startup or raise funds, don't hesitate to give us a call. At Blueballoon Capital , we have extensive expertise in strategic consulting and fundraising for startups at all stages.
Next Trend Realty LLC./wwwHar.com/Chester-Swanson/agent_cbswan
1 年Well said.