Inga Deakin stepped into her role as Partner earlier this year. We caught up with her to hear what’s been keeping her busy, and what’s next on her agenda.
What drew you to your role at Molten?
Molten is a very established company with a 20 year track record across multiple sectors and stages, so we collectively have experienced many different situations. We share an entrepreneurial attitude to our own business with the founders that we serve. We also have the ambition and autonomy to help support companies that can stand alone and create categories.
I have invested in deeptech companies from a VC focused on UK university spinouts, worked as Chief of Staff in the USA in VC-backed start up, and completed a PhD, so I was keen to apply and grow my experience in a larger fund operating across sectors and geographies.
What are your main responsibilities at Molten Ventures?
I work across different companies within the health and bio space. Within the team I focus on the whole lifecycle of an investment. So that starts with speaking to specialists, market research to build a thesis and identify companies. We often work with a potential new team for a while, getting to know them and the opportunity before they come to raise. For example, the last two investments I worked on, I met them over a year before we finalised any investment. Also, when we know the market well, we can move very quickly to support the best opportunity.
We typically price and lead investment rounds, so we work through the contractual and legal processes with our internal teams. We usually are on the boards of the companies so we can support them as they grow, sharing learnings across our own and wider portfolio experience. It’s part of a Molten investment that you don’t just get access and support from the single investor, but from the whole team. Our evergreen structure helps to align with the company goals. I’m constantly learning not just from my own portfolio companies, but also from our wider portfolio with companies at much later, larger stages going through transformations at each stage.
How do you define the space you work in?
The way I think about health and bio is anything that impacts patients or people. That could involve pharmaceutical, biotech, life sciences and medical device companies, healthcare systems and consumer products. As a cross-cutting theme, all of the companies I am responsible for, or work with, use and generate data to ultimately improve efficiency and health outcomes.
That could be improving efficiency in workflow, like with Anima, delivering software in healthcare, or manufacturing, making a product more accessible to the healthcare system, like with PolyModels. Some companies also sit across multiple parts of the ecosystem. Deciphex, for example, supports pathology in both pharma and healthcare systems.
What’s the process with finding a new company to invest in?
We look at themes, within which we build insight and experience, and are looking for emerging areas and gaps in the market.
We are constantly revising and reviewing these themes based on conversations with experts, conferences, extensive research and keeping up with new companies emerging as well as big corporate moves. For example, we have been anticipating the merging of consumer and patient and we have seen that starting to play out in larger corporates recently too.
How many deals have you lead?
I’m on five boards, and these are all deals I’ve led in the last few years, and several were highly competitive. I also support other companies in the portfolio informally or as observer.
What themes are you working on this year?
Themes include proprietary data capture in healthcare and how data flows are used to improve outcomes. Deciphex is an example of a company taking on clinical responsibility, processing data and building tools around it. I’m excited where we can use software to help clinical specialists focus on their highest value tasks.
I’m very interested in how we measure the body. We led an investment round into IMU Biosciences, a company deeply interrogating the immune system to understand health and disease from a blood sample. We are also thinking about how we can create non-invasive medical devices that we can use to prevent long-term conditions or illnesses at consumer quality. We made an investment in Hilo in blood pressure for example. There is overlap with consumer tech moving into medical, and medical devices moving into consumer.
Another theme I’ve been tracking is how we use software to better integrate data streams within hospitals. Right now, we have different data streams coming from various devices in operating rooms, so how do we better use software to integrate that? There are many new spaces in health.
What is one piece of advice you’ve received over the years that has stuck with you?
It’s a classic, but keep it simple. It’s easy to get excited about new things, but what will it do, why will someone use this… etc. We don’t need to know all the answers, but we need to ask good questions.
Thanks for sitting down with us today, Inga. To find out more about Inga and her investments you can check out her team profile page here.