The VC Endeavour Vision (Switzerland) has finally closed its Endeavour Medtech Growth (EMG) at €250M. This makes it one of the largest funds dedicated to MedTech innovation worldwide!
Largely oversubscribed, the fund reached its hard cap and closed well above its €150M target, finally reaching €250M – the largest fund dedicated to medtech in Europe, and one of the largest pure medtech funds ever…
EMG is targeting high potential European and US companies in the medical device and digital health sectors. To qualify, these have to demonstrate ‘innovative solutions’ for the health sector, which have also already gained regulatory approval and are starting to generate commercial traction.
Examples include Sophia Genetics (Switzerland), which is a genomics specialist (and the first bioinformatics company in Europe allowed to analyse clicnical data with NGS), also nominated in the top 10 of 100 Swiss start-up awards last year.
But larger biotechs have also been supported by EMG, such as Actelion (also Swiss) – the only European born biopharma to have over 1K employees (in fact over 2,547 of them). Founded in 1998, Actelion has already amassed a €16Bn global market value, with a research focus on pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH).
The medtech market was estimated at $369Bn (€330Bn) worldwide in 2015 (in a report by the Evaluate Group), and it is evolving at a rapid pace, creating new opportunities for investors. The report also found that worldwide medtech R&D expenditure is forecast to grow by 3.5% per annum to reach $29.5Bn by 2020.
There are also many academic spin-off and young entrepreneurs which are breaking into the Medtech field, some through start-up hubs like the German Accelerator in Boston.
Forbes recently nominated ‘30 under 30‘ individuals transforming European Biotech, with increasingly creative angles of problem solving in Medicine. So with the creativity and talent out there, it’s good to see additional funding (and incentive) made available to such individuals.
And it will be really exciting to see who in the start-up scene might benefit from EMG’s fund!