Fund fact sheet:
Size: $300m
Focus: Healthtech – Medical devices, diagnostics, healthcare software, research tools, tech-enabled services
Geography: Primarily Europe with the US and Israel also in scope
Maturity/stage: Commercial stage – growth/growth buyout (investing in minority and majority deals, EBITDA negative and EBITDA positive companies)
Ticket size: €10 – 40M
Potential lead: Yes
Follow on: Yes
Term Sheet: Typically take board seats
Previous Investments: Caresyntax (Digital Health), LUMICKS (Digital Health), Lifen (Life Sciences), Groupe PSIH (Digital Health)
How would you describe your VC and your investment thesis/guiding principles in one sentence?
Lauxera Capital invests in commercial stage healthcare companies in situations when the primary use of capital is value creation through commercial execution.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and the main partners in the team?
I created Lauxera Capital Partners in 2020 with Pierre Moustial and Alex Slack. Previously, I co-founded Allurion Technologies during my second year of medical school. Over ten years, along with my Allurion colleagues, I built a fully-integrated, global medical device company from the idea stage through commercialization in more than 30 countries. I started my career as a member of McKinsey and Company’s New York Office and Pharmaceutical and Medical Products Practice.
Before Lauxera, Alex focused primarily on healthcare public equity investments most recently as a generalist at Jackson Square Partners and before that for 10 years as a sector specialist at Maverick Capital, where he also participated extensively in the firm’s venture and growth investments in healthcare. Alex began his career in McKinsey and Company’s Boston Office doing corporate strategy and PE sponsor work in consumer and tech.
Pierre is the former CEO of Fournier Pharmaceuticals and the Urgo Group. Pierre has created billions of Euros of enterprise value through world-class commercial execution, more than 25 acquisitions and successful product lifecycle management.
Why do you think now is the right moment to launch this fund?
Covid proved that owning hotels is less defensive than it felt in 2019. The underlying demographics of our society and the emergence of transformational software, devices, and biopharmaceuticals make healthcare both a defensive and offensive play.
What is your unfair advantage? What do you bring besides money?
We’re operators and investors. We know what a great marketing plan looks like at €1m of revenue, €10m of revenue, and €100m of revenue. We don’t deploy capital and disappear. We aspire to be the board member the CEO calls first when a problem arises and we seek to serve as non-judgmental and solution-oriented peers.
What do you look for in entrepreneurs?
We invest when an entrepreneur has overcome technical and regulatory risk and needs to massively invest in commercial execution. We look for a clear vision, clearly defined tactics and a team with commercial execution experience that has delivered before. We’re not trying to invent the wheel.
Can you give a few examples of startups you previously invested in and why?
We invested in Caresyntax in January, 2021. Created in 2013, Caresyntax is on a mission to make surgery smarter and safer. It operates the leading vendor-neutral, enterprise-grade software platform for collecting, tracking, and analyzing surgical procedures. This real world evidence can be used by a patient’s care team during a procedure and accessed by those outside the operating room via the platform’s dedicated telehealth link. After an intervention, the Caresyntax platform also provides insights that help surgeons benchmark and improve their care. The technology enables hospital administrators to use surgical resources more efficiently, medical device companies to generate real-world evidence, and insurance companies to understand risk and devise more tailored policies.
Caresyntax was founded in Berlin, but also has significant presences in Boston and Chicago. The company has operations worldwide with a strong footprint in France and Germany. For example, the University Hospital of Strasbourg in France is a leading customer, using the Caresyntax platform to enrich orthopedic training, improve surgeon scores, and track patient risk.
The company’s AI-driven software platform has a proven, measurable impact on surgical efficiency and outcomes, reducing patient complications, OR downtime, and unneeded costs to health systems.
What is the best way for founders to approach you and what will convince you to have a first meeting?
Best to get an intro from someone we mutually know. Otherwise, ping us over LinkedIn! We’ll take a meeting if there are clear signs of revenue growth. A few hundred K of revenue is too early for our fund. Our hearts beat faster closer to EUR 10m of topline.
What is one advice you would give deep tech founders?
Stop worrying about dilution and surround yourself with people that know what world-class commercial execution looks like. Better to have a smaller piece of a much much bigger pie and to get to valuation inflexion points faster with lower risk.
Who are your LPs?
Our LP base includes Covea, Candriam, Bpifrance and the French public financial institution Caisse des Dépôts. Major European family offices also participated such as Tethys, Compagnie Nationale à Portefeuille (CNP), Financière Dassault, and Italmobiliare. The European Investment Fund (EIF), insurance leaders Matmut and Harmonie Mutuelle (Vyv Group), and Swen Capital Partners also participated in our final close.
What do you think will be the next big thing in healthcare?
We are spending a lot of time looking at manufacturing inputs for complex biologic therapeutic products. We are also focused on next-generation medical aesthetics and healthcare software that delivers cost savings to hospital systems.
What trends are you seeing in the healthcare investment landscape?
Public market healthcare growth company valuations have been hammered. We expect private company valuations to be impacted in the quarters ahead.
Head to Lauxera Capital Partners website for more info.
