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What Investors Want: Key Tips from Alexander Jekat

What Investors Want: Key Tips from Alexander Jekat

Raising VC funding as a health tech startup isn’t easy—especially at the pre-seed stage. Investors don’t just look at the innovation itself; they need to see a clear economic case, a realistic go-to-market plan, and at least a brief understanding of the regulatory landscape. Alexander Jekat, who is working as an Investment Analyst at Brandenburg Kapital GmbH, shares key insights on what makes a pitch stand out, common mistakes founders should avoid, and how to navigate the complex world of health tech funding. If you’re looking to secure investment, this is what you need to know.

A good idea of course always gets me, but apart from the idea itself, what really piques my interest is when I do not only see a display of patient use in the pitch deck but also a viable display of the economic benefit for the customer (mostly clinic/hospital, private practice or insurance company).

If you are pre-regulatory approval and market entry, it is very helpful for you and also to get VCs interested in you, to have pilot projects in place which show that the market is interested in your product (maybe they are already paying), and combine this with LOIs for contracts after regulatory approval. But please do not understand this in a way, that without this there is no way of gaining the interest of VCs/investors.

There are two I am seeing regularly. The first one is that the effort that is needed for market entry in the health care system (esp. in Germany) is underestimated. This leads to insufficient liquidity planning in combination with an unrealistic timeline. The second mistake is that the focus – when talking about the product – is mostly on patient benefit. Don’t get me wrong, this is very important and obviously must be given. Yet, and here we have a connection to the first mistake, if you are planning to sell a product to the health care system and it doesn’t matter whether you want to achieve reimbursement or not,  you need to have a crystal clear economic benefit as well. No matter if a health insurance company, or a clinic/hospital for example, are supposed to be your customer. There will always be a controller, manager or someone else who wants to know if the product fits in their budget, brings an economic advantage to the P&L or reduces their costs by decreasing insurance cases for example.

Regulatory compliance is one of the main market entry barriers in this sector. Assuming you already know what regulatory way you want to go and what you need for that, it is beneficial to have a clear roadmap for market entry ready before you are done with the regulatory part and in the best case, you already have pilot projects and/or LOIs in place that can convert to full contracts.

In health tech, one of the big questions is “Do you want to go the reimbursement-pathway or not, and if yes, why?” (if there is one for your product). This is a critical decision with significant impact on your go-to-market timeline and your financial plan. There is a saying in the biotech space that “biotech always takes more time and costs more money”. This also holds (to a certain degree) for health tech. Besides many other things, it is important to show a realistic timeline with financing requirements and respective milestones to get (further) financing.

For more tips and strategies on raising capital and scaling your health tech startup, stay tuned for more expert advice.

You can connect with Alexander on LinkedIn to continue the conversation and learn more about his work in the Life Sciences VC space.