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Thursday, 30 July 📍 Hale House, London

It’s in-person, and it’s the night we kick off everything we’ve been building towards. Theme, focus and speakers are coming soon and trust us, it’s worth the wait.

Pop the date in your calendar. Sign-up link and the full line-up will drop in the coming weeks. We’re so excited!

Neko Health upgraded its health scan experience with body composition and wearables integration, a notable step in proactive healthcare.
A sleep apnoea device just won one of the UK’s most prestigious MedTech awards. Nyxoah’s Genio therapy for obstructive sleep apnoea has won the 2026 Prix Galien UK Award for Best Medical Technology.
A new Nature analysis published this week examined two decades of FDA authorisations for digital medical devices and highlighted the rapid acceleration of software-based medical technologies.

In our last members’ insights section, our Chair, Shamik, gave you a VC’s perspective on funding. This week, we’re covering how you actually run a raise.

Our Finance Lead, Peter Kalpakov, works in healthtech and life sciences investment banking, focusing on M&A, dealmaking and investment. He has great experience in fundraising and how to go about it. We asked him the practical questions founders actually need answered.

Three things, in this order. First, a real gap in the market or a genuine disruption of an existing process, paired with a commercial opportunity. Not science for its own sake; a problem someone will pay to have solved. Second, the right commercial model: how the thing is actually bought, by whom, and how it gets reimbursed or paid for. I see brilliant technology attached to a route-to-market nobody has thought through, and that gap is usually fatal. Third, some form of external validation: a clinical signal, a paying design partner, a letter of intent, a credible KOL on side. Your own conviction doesn’t count; someone else’s does.

Beyond that, two things founders underrate. Know how much you’re raising and to what milestone – the next value-inflection point that makes the following round easier and pricier. And get the unglamorous housekeeping clean before you go out: a tidy cap table, IP properly assigned to the company, and a clear regulatory pathway. As an advisor, I’ve watched messy cap tables and IP holes kill otherwise fundable companies in diligence. Sort them before, not during.

📚 Book recommendation:

1. Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
2. Obviously Awesome by April Dunford

Think of it as a sequence, and most founders skip the early stages and pay for it later.

It starts with the equity story – the narrative that blends the market gap, how you fill it, why you are the team to do it, and how you’re positioned to win. Crucially, that story has to be told in commercial terms and backed by a model or, ideally, early data. That story becomes your pitch deck, whose only job is to get you through the investor’s door, supported by a financial model that holds up to scrutiny.

Next, prepare a dataroom before you need it, so you can move fast from the moment someone leans in. At minimum, it should hold: corporate (incorporation, cap table, shareholder agreements), IP (patents, assignments, freedom-to-operate), the regulatory pathway, clinical or preclinical data, the commercial picture (pipeline, contracts, LOIs, pricing and reimbursement strategy), the financial model and any historicals, the team, and an honest risk section.

Then map and tier your investors – research each fund’s stage, sector focus, cheque size and mandate, and build a tiered target list based on genuine fit. Now you run the outreach: pitching, conferences, and a lot of networking. This is where an experienced advisor like me earns their keep – warm introductions and existing relationships compress a process that otherwise drags. Initial interest becomes expressions of interest, then due diligence, then negotiation. A tip here: be proactive and prepare your own indicative term sheet to anchor the conversation, rather than passively waiting for theirs. Finally, closing – legals, signatures, and money in the bank.

📚 Book recommendation:

1. Venture Deals by Brad Feld & Jason Mendelson

Getting the size of the raise wrong – and it’s almost always too small. There’s a bias toward asking for less, to limit dilution or because optimism convinces founders they’ll need less than they do. It lands them in the valley of death: out of cash before they’ve hit the milestones they promised the last set of investors. From there, the maths turns against them – a flat or down round, heavy dilution, and a quiet but lethal signalling problem when new investors notice the existing ones aren’t happy and aren’t re-upping.

The root cause is usually the model. Founders are either too optimistic about growth (so the plan never survives contact with reality) or too pessimistic (so they under-raise and starve the company). The fix is unglamorous: size the raise to a credible value-inflection milestone, then add a real buffer for slippage, because everything in this industry takes longer than the plan says.

📚 Book recommendations:

1. The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

Green flags: Validation from third parties – paying customers, design partners, and real revenue. A company that could have bootstrapped or is already capital-efficient, but chooses institutional capital to accelerate and to bring in expertise, rather than to survive, that’s a position of strength. A logical proposition with a clear moat in a genuinely dynamic market. And, counter-intuitively, early interest from tier-2 or tier-3 funds: they may not be the eventual best-fit backer, but we deliberately use those conversations to gather intelligence and sharpen the positioning before approaching the tier-1 investors who are the real target. Finally, the ability to attract credible non-executive directors or board members who actually move the needle – not names on a slide.

Red flags: A company in the valley of death needing a quick injection just to hit milestones it already promised. Existing investors who won’t re-invest. Short runway and a raise being run under duress. An unclear commercial model. And a process that runs noticeably longer than planned – deal fatigue is real, and the longer a raise stays open, the more the market reads it as a signal.

📚 Book recommendation:

1. 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer

Build for a market, not a customer. The classic clinician trap is to craft something beautifully fitted to one workflow – one NHS trust, one institution that simply doesn’t generalise or travel to other markets and payers. Your clinical insight into the workflow and patient journey is a real edge, but investors fund scalable commercial models. The moment you’re raising, you’ve taken on a distribution and commercial problem, not just a clinical one.

Two more things. First, this is an unusually good moment to start lean. AI now lets a one-to-three-person team build and ship what used to require a large SaaS or CRM company – Mo Gawdat has made roughly this point, that you can now build serviceable tools at a fraction of the old cost and sell them to customers who’d rather not be locked into the giants. Healthcare is full of archaic processes ripe for exactly this; parts of the US system still run on fax machines. Real opportunity for solopreneurs who optimise unglamorous workflows. Second, stay flexible. Be ready to pivot quickly when the evidence tells you something is working and something isn’t, and pair up early with a commercial co-founder to cover your blind spots, the same way the best teams do.

📚 Book recommendation:

1. The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick

Longevity – and I think the timing is finally right. The single most important test for any drug, diagnostic or technology is whether it addresses a piece of biology that is both understood and addressable with today’s research tools. Ageing biology now broadly clears that bar: we understand a good deal about how cellular function drives ageing, and there are already multiple credible drug targets pointing toward diagnostics and biomarkers, treatments and protocols, and preventative clinics. That’s paired with regulators becoming more open to pathways for healthy-lifespan extension.

We talked a lot about validation in this conversation, so it’s worth noting the field is validating itself in a sensible way – starting with dogs, where timelines are shorter, and the customer is emotionally motivated. Loyal has earned genuine FDA traction toward a canine lifespan-extension drug, and Rejuvenate Bio is pursuing gene-therapy approaches in companion animals. And the capital has shown up: Altos Labs launched in 2022 with $3 billion, the largest biotech start-up launch on record, with others like Retro Biosciences following. After all, some of the biggest cheques in life sciences now sit in this space.

Where I’m more cautious: “longevity” as a label. The science I just described is exactly why I’m wary of consumer wellness, and supplement plays that borrow the word while selling reassurance on thin clinical validation. Same discipline as everywhere else in this piece – separate the validated biology from the branding, and treat reimbursement and liability as first-order questions, not afterthoughts.

I am a bit sceptical of microbiome therapeutics – a decade of hype, several high-profile clinical failures, only a narrow set of approvals (mostly C. diff). The biology is real; the translation has been brutal. Another thing is healthtech valuations – the 2021 cohort that raised at software multiples on businesses that are really services with heavy clinical-delivery costs and thin margins. Teladoc/ Livongo is the cautionary marker.

📚 Book recommendations:

1. Why We Die by Venki Ramakrishnan
2. Outlive by Dr Peter Attia
3. Age Later by Nir Barzilai
4. Super Agers by Eric Topol

“50% of something is much better than 100% of nothing.” - Fast and Furious
“Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” - Francis of Assisi
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” - Albert Einstein
“All bleeding eventually stops.” - Surgical Aphorism
“The common thing between all successful decks is that they are short and clear.” - VC Investor

Got a question you’d like us to ask Peter, or someone else in the community? Drop it in the comments or reach out directly.

Advice on fundraising and the date for our first NXGN event of the new era

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