Verve Ventures invests in European deep tech startups. Within deep tech, health & bio is a central focus area. You lead this practice. What is Verve’s core thesis?

We are interested in fundamental technological shifts, platform technologies that change how we discover drugs, diagnose disease, and deliver care. With its large pharma companies, strong biotech startups, and world-leading universities, we’re convinced that Europe has what it takes to produce outsized exits that generate attractive returns for investors. European entrepreneurs with a strong technical edge at the intersection of hardware, AI, and biology are creating companies with global potential.

How is drug discovery evolving?

The challenge of bringing new drugs to the market is enormous. The costs are immense, and success rates are low. We are looking for ways to accelerate the speed and improve the odds of drug discovery and development. They include AI-driven drug discovery, high-throughput screening platforms, advanced preclinical models, and clinical trial optimization. We live in an era of increasing understanding of biological data, genomics, proteomics, or medical images. A new generation of founder teams with strong computational backgrounds is building the tools to make sense of this data, harnessing it to make drug discovery more and more systematic and leaving the trial-and-error approach behind.

Increasingly, the most potent medicines are manufactured by live cells. These so-called biologics are costly and complex to manufacture. How can startups compete in this field?

Biologics such as monoclonal antibodies, antibody-drug conjugates, and cell and gene therapies significantly advance human progress. They enable targeted therapies that address previously untreatable conditions. The challenges of production complexity and costs are significant, but this again opens the door for innovation. While we don’t invest in single-asset biotech companies because of their considerable risks, we have invested in several startups that build versatile platform technologies capable of generating multiple candidates or enabling technologies that accelerate biologics’ discovery, delivery, or production.

How does your background in chemical and biological engineering influence your investment decisions?

We share the founders’ fascination. Understanding the underlying science and engineering is crucial for proper due diligence and adequate support in the post-investment phase. We want to engage deeply with founders; technical understanding helps us ask the right questions. It enables us to connect portfolio companies with the experts and partners in our extensive network. Our cross-industry experience also helps, as innovation happens at the intersection of fields, such as AI and biology or robotics and biology. We also see this in the best founding teams, which combine a deep understanding of several fields, not just medicine.

Is this the main asset of startups in this field, combining different forms of expertise?

Ideally, yes, but not just on a purely technical level. Understanding the economics and value chain and experience in reimbursement or negotiating pharma partnerships is equally essential in a highly regulated industry such as healthcare. The sooner a team of technical founders can bring such expertise to their company by hiring the right people, the better.

What is your way of working with entrepreneurs?

Trust is the basis of a constructive relationship. Entrepreneurs and investors should be open and transparent and not try to hide anything or promise things they cannot deliver. I like to meet founders early on in their journey and establish regular contact, even if they’re still in a too-early phase for us to invest. It is a way to understand each other better and build trust. It is the start of a long relationship if we decide to work together. Good personal chemistry helps.