PBM Capital Group

PBM Capital is a hybrid family office and operating company based in Charlottesville Virginia with an additional office in New York City. The firm is funded and led by the successful life science entrepreneur Paul Manning who started and sold several companies in his career. The firm can make investments ranging from approximately $5 to $1 million into companies and due to its funding structure has no requirements for holding period or capital structure. The firm makes investments in the forms of equity controlling interest in-licensing MBO/LBO growth capital and is also willing to co-invest. The firm is looking for companies located around the globe and makes around 5-15 investments in a given year.
Jayson Rieger
SVP of Business Development & Portfolio Management 

PhysioCue United States

PhysioCue is a medical device company that has developed an anti-hypertension medical device, clinically shown to immediately reduce the high blood pressure of hypertensive patients. This device is non-invasive and works by controlled cold therapy with the carotid artery baroreceptor reflex. Unlike drug treatments, our PhysioCue therapy device is efficient, safe, easy to use, non-invasive, and has none of the side effects associated with anti-hypertensive drugs. We also develop mobile Health device.

PhysioCue’s Mechanism of Action is the body’s natural baroreflexive system which provides important monitoring and feedback for blood flow throughout the body. It activates baroreceptors in the wall of the carotid artery which stimulate the afferent and efferent pathways of the automatic nervous system. To lower excessive blood pressure the brain responds by modulating efferent pathways, which relaxes the blood vessels, slows the heart rate and reduces fluid in the body. These actions reduce the afterload on the heart by decreasing arterial resistance, which improves the heart’s ability to pump blood to the tissues. The increase in parasympathetic tone and decrease in sympathetic drive results in the restoration of sympathetic-vagal balance which reduces excessive blood pressure and improves cardiac structure and function.

PhysioCue’s video has been published on YouTube http://youtu.be/A1bMjg5a3MY ,

Year Founded
2013
Main Sector
Indication
Biotech Phase of Development
Medtech Phase of Development
Technology Overview
anti-hypertension medical device
Supporting Metrics or Evidence
baroreflexive system
Current Financing Needs
$3M
Current Investors
Danen Ventures, TEEC Angels, Nextplay Ventures
IP Status
Issued IPs
Simon Yi
LinkedIn logo CEO 
BIO

Mr. Simon is a Silicon Valley veteran with nearly 20 years of experience in start-up manufacturing in the lubrication, bio sensory, and medical device industries. Most recently, Simon is a founder and CEO of PhysioCue, consumer medical device company at Silicon Valley and a co-founder of VORA OIL, a chemical engineering company dedicated to bringing highest performing industrial lubricants to the market, without causing disturbance to the environment and he is a founder and CEO at AcuTend, a medical device company that helps hypertension patients lower their high blood pressure to safe levels without the use of drugs. Simon was the Vice President of Technology and a co-founder at NeuroSky, which focused on the manufacturing and R&D of bio sensor for EEG, and EOG signals. He was a vice president at OpticLayer which focused on the manufacture optical filters, wires, and wireless combine telecommunication filter system with fully integrated electronics. Simon enjoyed and has hands on experienced in building revenue companies from scratch. Simon’s career began at HOYA Corporation, U.S.A.

Plug and Play Tech Center United States

Plug and Play Ventures (a successor fund to Amidzad Partners) is a private/family investment vehicle based in Silicon Valley, CA. The fund is a structured organization for making angel investments in pre-seed or seed rounds. Investments are in the form of equity; in the next 6 months Plug and Play Ventures expects to make about 5-10 seed investments of $50,000-100,000 and an additional 40 pre-seed investments of $25,000, and is hoping to increase their allocations in the healthcare sector. Plug and Play also provides a three-month accelerator program. The firm will consider investing in companies worldwide.

Plug and Play Ventures is interested in investing in medical technology, and invests in subsectors in which the firm can apply expertise; typically this means products that have a significant software component. Healthcare IT, biosensors, wearables and health monitoring devices are of interest. While the firm is open to investing in any indication, Plug and Play is particularly interested in diabetes & blood glucose monitoring, personal fitness, and mental/behavioral disorders. In the healthcare IT sector, Plug and Play Ventures is interested in both consumer applications and enterprise software, but is not interested in diagnostic software such as genomic, proteomic, or molecular diagnostic algorithms; however, optimization and data analysis software for hospitals and diagnostic laboratories is of interest.

Phillip Vincent
Corporate Partnerships Manager 

Plug and Play Ventures United States

Plug and Play Ventures (a successor fund to Amidzad Partners) is a private/family investment vehicle based in Silicon Valley, CA. The fund is a structured organization for making angel investments in pre-seed or seed rounds. Investments are in the form of equity; in the next 6 months Plug and Play Ventures expects to make about 5-10 seed investments of $50,000-100,000 and an additional 40 pre-seed investments of $25,000, and is hoping to increase their allocations in the healthcare sector. Plug and Play also provides a three-month accelerator program. The firm will consider investing in companies worldwide.  

Plug and Play Ventures is interested in investing in medical technology, and invests in subsectors in which the firm can apply expertise; typically this means products that have a significant software component. Healthcare IT, biosensors, wearables and health monitoring devices are of interest. While the firm is open to investing in any indication, Plug and Play is particularly interested in diabetes & blood glucose monitoring, personal fitness, and mental/behavioral disorders. In the healthcare IT sector, Plug and Play Ventures is interested in both consumer applications and enterprise software, but is not interested in diagnostic software such as genomic, proteomic, or molecular diagnostic algorithms; however, optimization and data analysis software for hospitals and diagnostic laboratories is of interest.


Neda Amidi
Investment Associate 

Prize4Life

Prize4Life is a non-profit organization founded in 2006 in Cambridge, MA focused on accelerating therapy development for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, aka Lou Gehrig's disease). Prize4Life uses incentive prizes to attract new minds and drive innovation in ALS drug development. The organization is running the $1M Avi Kremer ALS Treatment Prize4Life challenge for preclinical validation of a novel ALS therapeutic in an ALS mouse model, and submissions to this prize will be accepted until June 6th 2015. In addition to prizes, Prize4Life also runs infrastructure programs to support the ALS research community, such as the ALS FORUM, an online portal of cutting edge research and drug development news in ALS (www.researchals.org).

Sara Shnider
Executive Director 

Prolog Ventures United States

Prolog Ventures is a venture capital firm based out of St. Louis Missouri that was founded in 2001. The firm is currently making investments out of its vintage 2013 4th fund of approximately $100 million. The firm is looking to make equity investments in companies ranging from $500,000 to $3 million. The firm will invest in companies across the United States and plans to make approximately 3-4 investments over the next 6-9 months.

Brian Clevinger
Managing Director 

RCT Ventures

RCT Ventures invests in early-stage life science companies including medical devices, drug discovery platforms, and research tools.

Paul Grand
Paul Grand
LinkedIn logo Managing Director 
BIO

Grand is responsible for sourcing RCT’s investments in medical devices and representing RCT on the boards of its portfolio companies.

Prior to joining RCT, Grand was co-founder and VP Operations of Imagine Pharmaceuticals, which developed a platform to selectively deliver therapeutics and other compounds across the blood brain barrier. He was also co-founder and CEO of MicroSurgeon, which developed a microwave thermal ablation device for the treatment of solid tumors.

Grand has extensive experience in new company formation and fund raising. Since 1990, he has built, operated, recruited management and raised financing for eight high technology, medical device and biotechnology companies. Grand also was a Managing Director for Fruition Ventures, a group of private equity investors focused primarily on tech companies.

Grand is actively involved in programs to encourage bio-entrepreneurship, innovation and commercialization of University technologies. He has lectured, judged business plans, and mentored students and scientists at numerous universities, including UCLA, Stanford, USC, and UCSF. Grand serves as an investment advisor to the LARTA NIH Commercialization Assistance Program for SBIR program awardees. He is on the Oversight Committees for the Coulter Translational Research Partnership Programs at USC and University of Washington. Grand is a reviewer for proof of concept and commercialization-focused funding programs for the University of California system-wide, USC, University of Utah and University of Colorado. 

Grand is a frequent panelist at biomedical conferences. He has spoken at more than 100 conferences, been featured in hundreds of articles in publications including Forbes, New York Times and Wall Street Journal and appeared as an expert on Bloomberg Television, CNN, and CNN/FN. Grand serves as Producer and Host for the MedTech Innovator competition that seeks to discover outstanding early-stage MedTech opportunities - http://medtechinnovator.com

Chad Souvignier
Managing Director 

RiverVest Venture Partners United States

RiverVest Venture Partners is a venture capital firm that was founded in 2000 and is based in St. Louis, Missouri with additional office in Cleveland, Ohio. The firm currently has managed over $208 million of total assets. RiverVest has raised two investment funds with total committed capital of $165 million since inception. The recent fund closed at $75 million. RiverVest typically makes equity investments into global companies, and has no specific geographic preferences. The firm will consider making investments at all the stages, and focuses on investments in seed, early-stage and select later-stage companies. The typical investment size is around $6 million, though the firm can invest more or less, depending on the opportunity. 

RiverVest is extremely opportunistic when it comes to investments in the life sciences space; with that being said RiverVests specified sectors and sub sectors of interest may or may not be an area in which RiverVest is currently looking to allocate capital to. The firm invests in companies in the biotech therapeutics and diagnostics, as well the medical technology space. 

Some of the firms investments have included companies developing biotech therapeutics and diagnostics targeting diseases of the blood and blood forming organs, neoplasms, cancer, and oncology, skin and subcutaneous tissue, cardiovascular diseases, diseases of the ear, and infectious diseases. The firm has also invested in companies developing anti-body based therapeutics. The firm has also invested in firms developing medical technologies such as therapeutic radiation devices, active implantable devices, non active implantable devices, hospital hardware, and imaging devices.

Year Founded
2000
Investor Type
Medtech Phase of Development
Capital Structure Preference
Investment Stage Preference
Karen Spilizewski
VP 

RSP Systems A/S Denmark

RSP Systems A/S is dedicated to improving the health and quality of life of people worldwide through its unique and patented solution for non-invasive diagnostics. The first targeted application is a product line of non-invasive glucose monitors, which will provide diabetics with a convenient, pain-free alternative to the current invasive solutions, which require the diabetic to puncture his or her skin to extract blood onto an expensive test strip.

 

Year Founded
2006
Main Sector
Medtech Subsector
Medtech Phase of Development
Technology Overview

RSP’s technology is based on a direct optical detection principle, Raman spectroscopy, a mature technology to which RSP has developed and patented improvements enabling the measurement of concentrations of various substances in the interstitial fluid (tissue fluid surrounding the cells of the body) non-invasively through the skin. Proof-of-concept for glucose measurement on diabetics has been demonstrated through pilot trials in collaboration with Odense University Hospital in Denmark. 


Jacob Philipsen
CEO 

Sand Hill Angels

Sand Hill Angels is an angel group that was founded in 2 and is headquartered in Sunnyvale California. The group focuses on investments in early-stage (from seed to series C) companies in the Life Sciences IT Internet and Clean Tech sectors. The group prefers to make equity and convertible notes investments and the typical investment size ranges from $.1million to $.5million. The group will consider syndicating with other investors for larger investments. The group will consider companies across the US.
Stephen Pollitt
Board Member Membership Chair