Sebastian Gensior

In the spring of 2025, biotech startups find themselves navigating an increasingly treacherous fundraising landscape. While headlines boast of massive funding rounds, many founders are grappling with a disconcerting trend: the "ghost round." These are funding rounds that are publicly announced, complete with press releases and media coverage,

Family offices are often portrayed as paragons of “patient capital,” stewards of dynastic wealth with investment horizons stretching across generations. Over the past two decades, this perception has solidified in financial circles, especially in Europe and the Middle East, where venerable family fortunes and new oil wealth alike are managed

Biotech companies often face a critical funding gap: bringing a new therapy from lab to market is exceedingly expensive, yet traditional equity or debt financing can be difficult, dilutive, or costly. In this context, royalty financing has emerged as a strategic alternative. By selling rights to future drug royalties in

Venture capital, like most human activities involving large sums of money and delayed gratification, has developed a hierarchy. At the top: the VCs—those chiselled, deal-sourcing demigods who turn PowerPoints into paper unicorns. But behind them, a quieter, more layered breed exists: the fund-of-fund. It is a

In venture capital, your returns depend less on genius and more on calendar luck. Especially in biotech. Venture capitalists like to imagine they make money through insight. The right founders. The right sectors. The right syndicates. But behind the curtain of strategy decks and IRR models lies a far simpler

Biotech, we were told, had entered its age of austerity. The days of bloated valuations and preclinical moonshots were over. Europe, never one to lead the euphoria, was expected to trail the correction. Yet somewhere between rate hikes and risk aversion, a strange thing happened: the continent’s life-science

The pronouncement that "It’s Never Been Harder to Make It in Venture Capital," as captured by Bloomberg, is more than a fleeting headline. It’s a signal of a seismic shift in the venture landscape, a contraction whose tremors are felt with particular intensity in the demanding

At the recent Capital for Cures gathering in Milan, a curated group of biotech innovators, investors, and family office leaders came together to challenge the status quo of life science financing. While the conversation spanned AI, partnerships, and new therapies, a clear consensus emerged: the current model is not enough.

If you’ve ever wondered how governments decide which new drugs to fund and which to reject, chances are the Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY) is lurking somewhere in the background. This tidy little metric, designed to measure the value of health outcomes, underpins cost-effectiveness analyses around the world.

If biotech were a footrace, Europe would be the competitor with flawless running shoes, world-class muscle tone—and one leg inexplicably tied to a lamppost labelled "structural inefficiencies." Meanwhile, the U.S. is sprinting ahead, cheered on by giddy pension funds tossing dollar bills like confetti. This—