Anthony Vallance-Owen Presents We Venture Capital at LSI Europe '23

Transcription

Anthony Vallance-Owens  0:05  
Good morning, everyone. It's great to see so many people here relatively early in Spanish terms. And it's a real pleasure to be here today to introduce what's going to be a great session, we've got a really great lineup of speakers and startups, and I'm sure everyone can't wait to get in it. But if you could please indulge me just for a few minutes, because we're also very proud to have very recently, just a couple of weeks ago, launched a new corporate venture capital fund, which is called We Venture Capital. And it's great and amazing event to be at to formally launch ourselves and come out of our shell. We are a corporate venture capital arm of worth in worth, if you don't know it, I'm a global diagnostics player. And therefore, it won't come as too much surprise, but we're going to invest in that area. But more on that in a minute. Firstly, our team. And as many of you know, culture is set from the top. And we are extremely lucky. And we venture capital to have Louise Varma to come in and head our fund. And she is she's a real powerhouse. She was a medical doctor, and then did a clinical innovations fellowship. She then was a CEO and founder for a med tech startup. And then over the last nine plus years, she's been investing in life sciences. So we're truly lucky and happy to have her to come and head us. I'm the other senior team member. And we're also lucky to have great diversity in our first initial team. I bring much more of a financial background having spent the last 17 years or so working with companies for various parts of significant change in their life, whether that's raising money, m&a, and divestments and ultimately, exits, whether that's private, private, private equity, or also listed on the stock exchange in US, Europe and the UK. We also have a team supporting us, we've got some great interns and many of you might have met God chair who's here with us this week. And we're lucky to have that support as we launch. So our investment focus is we like to say we invest across all of diagnostics and digital health. And we're particularly interested in the intersection where the two meets. And as we've heard on many talks and presentations this week, it's a really exciting moment, I think at the moment in healthcare, with a lot of different parts of healthcare sort of all coming a lot closer and digital binding them together. Given we're here, we should also say we absolutely do invest in med tech, but the less invasive type, and also life science tools, research tools, but we could see coming into diagnostics in the next five or so years are also areas where we will look to invest a little bit about us we focus on Series A, but we do have flexibility to invest at seed or b If a case is particularly interesting. We absolutely do follow on invest. And we're very happy to have an evergreen structure that gives us a bit more flexibility to hopefully work with our startups to avoid through to exit. We are an active investor. More on that on the next slide. And also we're happy to lead co lead or follow depending on the case. So our approach, we feel very lucky to have the power of werfen behind us. And what that means is is we really want to be able to bring that information and knowledge across the world to our portfolio companies. So most in most cases, we want to try and be on a board position in order to be able to bring that expertise. And as you've also seen from the team between us, we've got some great experience in the venture space and be advising Business Growth space. And again, hopefully we can bring that to our startups by working closely. And again, for the Evergreen structure. We really want that lasting partnership. We want to work with you support you all the way through to a happy conclusion for so that's a little bit about us. We've got some more information on our website. If this week we've got Louise here. She's actually doing a fireside chat later today. So please do catch fire. It should be great. I'm around and gotcha is going to be around as well. So grab one of us and we'll be more than happy to speak to give you more information. And it is wonderful to be here to be able to launch ourselves and we thank you guys so much for for having us.