James Coates
Contributor
James Coates is the Health and Human Performance principal at Decisive Point, a venture capital and advisory firm that invests in and supports startups with emerging defense technologies.
Future-proofing the finances of your biotech startup through a market collapse means more than just raising capital or rushing to close your round.
I perform due diligence on dozens of life science companies each week whose technologies might help future-proof the world against the next biothreat, pandemic or otherwise. I see everything from neural probes and artificial intelligence for clinical trials to synthetic biology and quantum sensors. Every startup coming across my desk was well capitalized, but trouble might be on the horizon.
With inflationary market dynamics now firmly here and fiscal tightening ongoing, it’s natural that more speculative ventures with higher cash burns, such as biotech — especially the deep science stuff — suffer the most and suffer first.
But government investment cycles oppose private investment dynamics. When the economy is doing better, it requires less intervention and sup …
