Welcome to the 79th edition of Deep Tech Catalyst, the channel by The Scenarionist, where science meets venture!
Life sciences startups don’t follow the standard playbook—especially when you're spinning out from academia.
In this edition, we explore the unspoken challenges of building at the edge of biotech, where patents aren’t always the answer, market sentiment shapes strategy, and the right partnerships can make or break your trajectory.
To unpack how to navigate this high-stakes terrain, we’re joined by Ingrid Kelly, Partner at xista science ventures!
In this edition, we dive into:
How to decide whether to license your tech or build a company around it
When not to file a patent—and how to protect innovation differently
How to validate your idea before you even start the company
Why understanding sentiment is as important as understanding the science
How to raise early capital without killing your narrative
Let’s get into it! 🧬
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BEYOND THE CONVERSATION — REFLECTIONS & STRATEGIC INSIGHTS FROM THE EPISODE
The First Decision: Licensing or Building a Company?
One of the earliest and most important decisions a scientist faces when considering commercializing a discovery is whether to license the technology to an established company or to build a startup around it. While out-licensing can seem like the more straightforward and less risky path, the reality is that this route is seldom viable, especially in the early stages of life sciences innovation.
According to Ingrid Kelly, technologies emerging from academic labs are almost always too immature to attract interest from large industry players. Licensing, in practice, rarely materializes because the development gap is simply too wide.
For pharma or large corporations to even consider a licensing deal, the technology must be significantly de-risked, with clear data, validation, and a viable development roadmap in place. Academic discoveries, while often scientifically promising, typically lack that level of readiness.
As a result, most founders find themselves facing a different question: not whether to license, but whether and how to build a company around the technology to move it closer to a stage where such partnerships become possible.
The cornerstone of any startup is not the science alone — it’s the people.
A company cannot exist without a team capable of turning potential into progress. What’s more, those individuals do not need to be experienced operators from day one. What matters more is potential: the capacity to grow into leadership roles, make smart decisions, and build momentum around the venture.
The next critical element is the technology.
At the very earliest stage, founders should be able to articulate a clear concept for what the core technology is or will become. Whether it’s a proprietary dataset, a unique assay, or an innovative approach, there must be something that offers at least a temporary exclusivity or defensibility. In some cases, filing a patent too early could even be detrimental — a topic Ingrid expands on further in the next section.
However, a strong team and promising technology are not enough on their own. Venture investors also need to see ambition.
Founders must have a vision — bold, credible, and big enough.
Venture capital is, at its core, a collaborative pursuit of an ambitious goal. Both founders and investors must believe in a transformative outcome and work together toward achieving it.
"It’s clear that coming along and saying: «Well, we've got great tech, we're great people, but no vision.» No VC is going to jump into that. It’s a kind of collaborative dream, if you like. The VC and the founders have to come together and think: What can we achieve? What big ambition are we going for?"
Only when these three pillars — people, technology, and vision — are in place does it become realistic to build a company capable of attracting venture funding and scaling toward impact.
Intellectual Property in Life Sciences
When Not to File a Patent
One of the most common assumptions among scientific founders is that filing a patent early is both necessary and advantageous. But in the life sciences, and especially at the pre-company stage, this assumption can be misleading. Ingrid Kelly argues that early-stage patenting can be unnecessary — and in some cases, actively counterproductive.
Consider a scenario common in early biotech ventures: a research group has developed a novel assay, a unique cell line, or a valuable dataset. Filing a patent at this stage might appear to be a smart move — a way to stake a claim and enhance the perceived value of the innovation. However, Ingrid warns that doing so can unintentionally reveal too much. Patent applications are published 18 months after filing, and at that point, every detail disclosed becomes accessible to the global research community, including competitors.
If the underlying insight could have been maintained as a trade secret, then premature patenting may do more harm than good. Particularly for platform technologies or enabling tools, the better path might be to keep certain technical details confidential until stronger, more targeted IP can be developed.
The guest highlights that trade secrets — far from being a secondary option — are often a central part of a well-designed IP strategy in life sciences.
Moreover, patents are expensive. Filing, prosecuting, and maintaining them across multiple geographies represents a substantial financial commitment — one that few early-stage startups can afford without serious trade-offs. At the beginning of a company’s journey, it is essential to be strategic about how and when IP resources are deployed.
Crafting a Smart, Selective IP Strategy
Instead of rushing to file, Ingrid advises founders to take a holistic view of intellectual property from the outset. That means thinking not just about protection, but about timing, long-term relevance, and alignment with the business model.
If the startup is building a drug discovery platform, for example, it may be more important to develop strong know-how and proprietary processes than to file broad claims too early. If, instead, the model is focused on developing and selling services or tools, then a very different IP approach may be warranted — one that supports validation and potential B2B partnerships.
In either case, IP decisions should be made deliberately and in context.
What matters is not checking the box that says “patent filed,” but developing a coherent strategy that supports future differentiation and investability. Ingrid emphasizes that the best founders — and the investors who back them — think years ahead. They anticipate not only what protection they’ll need, but also what story that IP will help them tell to future partners, regulators, or acquirers.
Ultimately, in life sciences, intellectual property is not just a legal formality. It’s a strategic tool — and one that must be wielded with foresight and discipline.
Map the Path, Validate the Market
In traditional drug development, the pathway is known. Thousands of companies have walked it before, and there are clear expectations at each stage — from target identification, through preclinical and clinical phases, to eventual acquisition or partnership. Investors, regulators, and pharma acquirers all speak the same language and look for the same inflection points.
But when a company is developing something less standard — for example, a platform for drug discovery, a novel delivery mechanism, or a bio-enabled technology — the roadmap doesn’t exist in the same form. That’s both a challenge and an opportunity. Founders must map the pathway themselves, making it understandable to investors and partners, while retaining flexibility in case the market shifts or technical hurdles arise.
This means that the clarity of strategy becomes critical.
Talk to Industry Before Launching Your Company
A particularly costly mistake, Ingrid points out, is waiting too long to seek feedback from industry. Many academic founders assume that validation should come only after they’ve incorporated a company or made technical progress. But in reality, the most valuable feedback often comes far earlier, when the stakes are lower, and the idea is still fluid.
Crucially, reaching out to individuals in industry — not just companies — is easier than most scientists expect. When you’re not selling a product, but simply asking for insight or guidance, many professionals are surprisingly open. In fact, academics often find that people are happy to help, especially when approached with humility and genuine curiosity.
These early conversations serve multiple purposes.
First, they help founders understand what problems the industry actually cares about — where the real pain points and unmet needs lie.
Second, they offer a sanity check on whether the proposed solution has real-world relevance.
And third, they begin to form a network of contacts who may later become advisors, board members, key opinion leaders, or even team members.
Ingrid strongly encourages scientists to begin building these networks before founding a company. Use LinkedIn. Leverage university connections, incubators, or existing investors. And maintain those relationships once the company is formed. That way, when the time comes to seek partnerships, raise money, or secure endorsements, you’re not reaching out cold — you’re continuing a conversation.
Ultimately, early engagement with industry is not just about market validation. It’s about anchoring the startup in reality, shaping the story, and making sure that the vision is aligned with what the ecosystem is actually ready to support.
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Understand Sentiment, Craft the Right Narrative
The world of life sciences startups is not just built on science — it’s built on strategic storytelling. Founders must do more than prove technical feasibility; they must articulate a compelling vision that captures the imagination of investors, partners, and the broader ecosystem.
This is where sentiment plays a central role. Sentiment, as Ingrid defines it, is the collective feeling and mindset within a specific community — what people are excited about, what they’re skeptical of, and where attention is flowing. It’s not always rational or stable, but it’s incredibly influential. Understanding sentiment means understanding how your innovation will be received — not just by scientists or regulators, but by the financial and strategic decision-makers who will ultimately fund or acquire your company.
Knowing the scientific merit of your work is essential, but insufficient. You also need to know how it will be perceived in context:
What’s hot in pharma right now?
Is interest surging in a certain modality, like targeted protein degradation?
Are gene therapies facing skepticism due to cost challenges?
Are AI-driven discovery platforms seen as promising or oversaturated?
These are all questions of sentiment, and the answers can dramatically influence how you position your company.
For founders, this means actively scanning the ecosystem. Read industry publications. Track what major pharma companies are saying at conferences. Follow venture deal trends. And most importantly, engage with people — ask them what excites them, what worries them, what they’re paying attention to. These informal inputs are often more valuable than market reports.
Adapting Your Pitch Without Losing Your Core
Once founders understand the prevailing sentiment, the next step is to shape their narrative accordingly. It means recognizing which aspects of your work will resonate most with a given audience, and leading with those.
For example, if your technology has an AI component and you’re speaking to investors who are particularly excited about AI in drug discovery, emphasize that angle. If you're talking to a pharma partner concerned about delivery challenges, highlight how your platform addresses those pain points.
This approach applies not only to technology features but to the broader business plan.
In some cases, adjusting your narrative may involve rethinking your entire go-to-market strategy to align with where the industry is heading. Founders should be prepared to evolve their messaging and even pivot their direction, if that’s what the market is signaling.
Equally important is doing homework on potential investors:
What have they backed before?
What themes do they talk about publicly?
Where do they have conviction?
By tailoring your pitch to reflect their worldview, you not only increase your chances of success, but you also demonstrate that you’re a founder who listens, learns, and adapts.
Ultimately, sentiment is about alignment between the story you tell and the story your audience is ready to hear. And mastering that alignment is one of the most powerful skills a scientific founder can develop.
Financing the Journey: Strategies Before Revenue
In the early stages of building a life sciences company, financial runway is both a lifeline and a strategic enabler. Yet generating revenue is rarely feasible before reaching significant technical and regulatory milestones. Ingrid Kelly underscores that the path to commercialization in biotech is long and capital-intensive, and founders need to prepare accordingly.
Grants and Strategic Collaborations
One of the most effective early-stage funding strategies is to maximize access to non-dilutive capital. Government grants, R&D incentives, and innovation programs are available in many regions and can provide substantial resources without diluting ownership or triggering valuation discussions. These grants can help fund research, development, and even clinical trials in some cases, effectively extending the company’s runway and increasing its attractiveness to future investors.
In parallel, founders often explore industry collaborations as a potential revenue stream. This is particularly relevant for companies developing platform technologies, where the validation of external use cases can reinforce the core value proposition.
For example, a startup with a novel screening platform might partner with a pharma company to apply it to a specific target class. Even if these collaborations don’t generate large cash payments, they can offer proof of concept, key data, and visibility in the market.
However, Ingrid offers a strong caution. Founders must be mindful that such collaborations, if pursued too early or without alignment to the company’s core strategy, can become distractions. Personnel may end up tied to side projects. Strategic focus can drift. And in the worst case, the company may be seen as a service provider rather than a venture-scale innovator.
Every partnership must be weighed against the long-term trajectory of the company:
Will it validate the technology?
Will it generate useful data?
Will it support the next major funding round?
CVCs and Strategic Alignment
Another strategic option Ingrid raises is engaging with corporate venture arms — investment vehicles tied to major pharmaceutical companies. These investors can offer more than just capital. Their backing serves as a form of validation, and their internal networks can unlock future collaboration or acquisition opportunities.
Yet here, too, balance is essential. If a startup aligns too early or too closely with one corporate partner, it may inadvertently signal exclusivity. This could deter other pharma companies from engaging, fearing that the startup is already on a path toward being acquired by a competitor. Ingrid recommends structuring relationships carefully, ensuring that flexibility and openness to multiple future outcomes are preserved.
For platform companies in particular, early-stage collaborations with multiple partners across different applications can be highly valuable — not necessarily as profit-generating deals, but as credibility builders. In these cases, even modest payments or shared R&D projects can go a long way if they result in validated use cases or publishable outcomes.
What’s clear across all these options is that early-stage funding in biotech is rarely about generating profit. It’s about building momentum, establishing legitimacy, and reaching the next major inflection point. And that means choosing funding strategies that do more than cover costs — they must also advance the strategic narrative of the company.
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Valuation, Inflection Points, and Competitive Intelligence
Valuation in the life sciences is fundamentally tied to risk — and how much of it has been removed at any given point in time. The guest explains that biotech startups are typically valued based on technical milestones, not revenue, because cash flow often comes much later in the lifecycle. Instead, investors look to inflection points — moments when uncertainty is reduced and the company’s value proposition becomes more tangible.
Understanding Milestones in Biotech
In drug development, these inflection points are well-established. The journey begins in the preclinical phase, where candidate compounds are tested for safety, pharmacokinetics, and target engagement in laboratory settings, including animal models. This phase can take several years and requires careful experimentation and validation.
Once a compound is deemed promising, it enters the clinical stage, beginning with Phase I (focused on safety in humans), followed by Phase II (testing for efficacy and dosing) and Phase III (larger-scale trials for efficacy and adverse effects). Each progression through this pipeline lowers risk and increases the company’s perceived value.
At each stage, if the data are positive, the startup becomes more attractive to future investors, strategic partners, or acquirers. As Ingrid notes, this model is well-understood and widely accepted in traditional biotech and pharma circles. For medtech, the structure is somewhat similar. But for areas like digital health or novel therapeutic platforms, the pathway is often less linear, and that makes understanding comparable cases all the more important.
Valuation Is Both an Art and a Negotiation
Before approaching investors, entrepreneurs should first do their homework. The most credible valuations are not based on abstract projections or general market sizes, but on grounded, observable precedents — what other similar companies are raising, at what stage, and with what traction.
Competitive intelligence becomes a key tool here.
Founders should look for peer companies working in the same indication, modality, or technology class — ideally, those that are one or two steps ahead in development.
These comparables help frame the opportunity in tangible terms: if a U.S.-based startup with a similar approach has reached Phase II and attracted a $500 million pharma deal, that becomes a powerful signal that the market opportunity is real and the business model is credible.
The guest cautions against overreliance on theoretical metrics like TAM (Total Addressable Market) or SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market). While necessary for formal business plans, they often lack the practical relevance investors seek. What matters more is whether others have successfully commercialized similar innovations, and what the outcomes of those efforts have been.
Finding the Right Balance in Early-Stage Negotiations
When it comes to early-stage fundraising, Ingrid recommends a pragmatic approach. Founders should begin by asking themselves:
How much capital do we need to reach our next inflection point?
How much dilution are we prepared to accept?
From there, a back-of-the-envelope valuation can be sketched.
If multiple investors provide consistent feedback that the valuation is too high, that should be taken seriously.
One technique to manage this tension is to raise funds in smaller tranches tied to milestones. This reduces dilution upfront and allows for valuation to increase as the company hits key objectives. Another is to remain open to adjusting the pitch, not just the valuation, but the way the opportunity is framed, based on investor reactions.
Ingrid also notes that sometimes the issue is not the number itself, but the investor fit.
An early-stage AI-driven company might command a higher valuation from a tech-focused VC than from a pharma-oriented one. Understanding who you’re pitching to — their thesis, their past deals, their risk tolerance — can help ensure the negotiation is grounded in mutual expectations.
Ultimately, valuation is not just a number. It’s a reflection of perceived risk, strategic fit, and market readiness. And for founders willing to engage openly, listen carefully, and adapt intelligently, it becomes not a barrier, but a bridge to the capital, partnerships, and progress they need.
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