ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Few issues are as pressing as the role that strategics are playing and will play in funding medtech start-ups, especially as more traditional venture investors have retrenched and/or shifted to later-stage investments. Today, small medtechs look to strategics to move in as early-stage investors. That’s the flip side of the current biotech climate, where start-ups can be selective in their choice of investors and thus don’t depend on strategics to play any special role.
Medtech and biotech investing have long danced in asynchronous step. When biotech investors grew worried in the mid-2000s, many of them turned to medtech, in part if not whole, as a hedge against their biotech investments, lured by the promise of lower risk, smaller investments, and more predictable results and exits.
