Venture Investing in Animal Health

“If we can’t get to a strong ROI for the producer very quickly, it’s an easy pass for us.”

?? a nugget that the partners from Fulcrum Global Capital, a global food & ag venture capital firm, shared in a conversation on venture investing in animal health including:

• The key areas of opportunity in animal health, across both biotech and digital, and from an outcome based perspective – not just raw efficiency. (Go to the 5 minute mark in the YouTube link below.)
• How Fulcrum works with their investor base of actual producers, a non-traditional approach compared with most venture funds backed by institutional capital. (12 minute mark)
• The benefit to producers of investing in a venture fund. I’m intrigued by the idea of giving producers an opportunity to invest in their area of expertise and generate venture returns while giving them access to solutions that address operational problems, potentially creating even larger returns from an operational standpoint. (19 minute mark)
• When is venture capital the right tool to scale a startup. “Venture is good when you have a founder that has aligned beliefs with venture capital – disruptive tech, scale quickly, exit within a specific time frame. We’re looking for solutions to billion dollar problems across global agriculture.” (27 minute mark)
• “The exit market is being defined as we speak. One of the challenges with animal health, especially drugs and vaccines, is sometimes those are long runways that don’t match up with venture timelines. Understanding how those pieces fit together (runways, exit paths, multiples, etc) will start to define what levels of risk capital will be available to founders and help investors understand what parts of animal health will be venture backable.”

This conversation has relevant gems for producers, entrepreneurs, and strategics. Check it out here (link) and subscribe to the Prime Future YouTube channel while you’re there.