Louise Warme, We Venture Capital | Interview at LSI Europe '23

Transcription

Louise Warme  0:00  
My name is Louise Warme, Swedish nowadays I live in Barcelona. As a head of We Venture Capital, which is our newly launched fund. I got into venture capital a little bit by accident little serendipity, if you will, with a background as a medical doctor and researcher, I meant to follow a traditional MBA track. But instead, I tweaked into the fellowship, a curling institute in innovation management and design thinking. And from that, we found it a mentor company so became a founding CEO of a mid to company grew that from an idea on a napkin till an exit process. And on the back of that I was invited to join an investment vehicle. So that got me into venture capital investment, did four years of pharmaceutical investments four years of responsible for a life science portfolio in my previous fund, and I was very happy when Werfen called and offered me and my team to build the venture capital for them. Going into strategic, which is a wonderful angle, which brings a lot of knowledge to the investments that we do. Now, we recently launched We Venture Capital, which is the corporate venture arm of orphan. It's a new strategic initiative for us, which we're very proud of. We're investing primarily in diagnostics and digital and we love the intersection between the two. And also sort of the halo around round at all, which for us is more research tools, lab tools, and anything else that is more bordering the diagnostic space. So our investment scope is mainly as a Series A investor, we can also invest seed and Series B, we really like to engage with the companies that we invest in, given that we're a fairly specialized fund, and also come from a mother company with incredible amount of knowledge experience in growing and, and really getting diagnostics out there. We want to leverage that into the companies. So we do that through board work would do that through business unit collaborations. And it's important for us to be very close to the companies that we do invest in, we are very proud of our team. First of all, they're amazing people, we share a lot on values worth and come with values of of working, very focused, but also with the family values that comes with having a family owned company. And we're trying to leverage that into the team, we believe very much in diversity. We're a team of seven representing six different countries, three different continents, and in a few months, we're having another member from a fourth continent join us. And we're also very one of our few venture teams who are actually half and half gender, we actually have one more female than male at the stage. And we find that brings, great dynamics that helps us when we look at new opportunities. Our goals for the conference was mainly to meet deal flow, to find new partners in VCs to co invest with, but also to get a bit of pulse on on what's going on in the industry. The most surprising thing that we saw was the relevance of the deal flow for us being a first time attendee, we assumed it would be very medtech heavy, but we have actually met a lot of companies with good relevance for us as a diagnostics investor. Advice choosing your investors. Yes, well, first of all choose us. But second of all, find someone that fits you. And I think that's the side of that joke, right? Because we're a very specialized investors. So what we can bring to the table is knowledge in, in essence, most of the journey that the companies will do in diagnostics, whether that's regulatory paths, reaching markets, distribution agreements, we have that knowledge and we will leverage that into the companies that we invest in. And if you're in a different field, try to find someone with a similar profile that will bring more than money to the table. Our primary focus as we close for 2023 is, of course, to make a big shout out about the launch. The team has worked very hard and we've been very fortunate to have werfen backing us in this new initiative. We're looking at closing a few more investments and building a portfolio of course, and overall we're looking at very bright future with Werfen