The Challenge
Headquartered in the Netherlands, Delmic is building microscopy workflows that aid research work in the field. With a broad set of proven applications for their workflows, Delmic has previously raised €6m from the European Investment Fund, the European Innovation Council and Value Creation Capital.
Since Delmic operates in a specialized sector that requires deep expertise in the field, the biggest challenge for Sander (Founder, Delmic) lies in identifying financing partners that understand his specific sub-sector.
Identifying Sector Specialists via Metal
With Metal, Sander is able to take a systematic approach in identifying investors that specialize in life sciences and that meet a specific criteria –
For Sander, the ability to systematically identify all investors that have deep expertise within Healthcare is a great starting point. Going one level deeper, the ability to identify investors that have made a series of investments in the “Instrumentation” sub-sector builds a higher level of precision. Additionally, the ability to augment the sector filters with other criteria create an efficient way to quickly identify the “most likely” financing partners.
In his own words, Sander reminds us that, “It’s not just the investor identification that draws me to Metal, the depth and richness of data in the right-hand sidebar is critical. One of the biggest efficiency drivers is the ability to plug in my network data and then see intro pathways flowing into each investor.”
Impact on the Fundraising Process
For Sander, the ability to consolidate all fundraising-related research, operations and pipeline formation in one place has led to a significant value add. With Metal, there have been two key areas of impact for Delmic:
• The efficiency that results from having data readily available to seamlessly identify, qualify and access the right investors
• The precision that results from having the complete information. Unlike “sector specific investor lists”, Metal provides Delmic complete and holistic information on each investor’s investing trends, activity levels and capital availability
Executive Summary
• With the right tools and efficiency, fundraising doesn’t need to be super time-intensive
• Identifying and qualifying the right investors is the highest leverage activity in a fundraise
• Tags for sector, stage or geography are less useful than quantitative filtering
