Introducing our scout network
We think our sweet spot - where we can provide the most support and feel most in our element - is helping the best scientist-entrepreneurs out there in their transition from the lab into their own company. Naturally, this means we are eager to meet scientists when they are only just thinking about spinning off. At this point, there is mostly no registered company, no official website or much to be found about these future startups-to-be. To get to know these scientists early requires being embedded in a lot of local or topic-specific communities.
Additionally, we believe great science can originate in many different places, and we are eager to invest in teams across Europe - but: we are only a small team of four people. So how can we manage to be embedded in hundreds of scientific networks across Europe at the same time?
With this in mind, our scout network was born. We envisioned a community of scientists, entrepreneurs and innovators, deeply immersed in their local scientific ecosystems with a hunch for identifying great science and great scientist-entrepreneurs, a love for entrepreneurship and curiosity around figuring out how to get these innovations into the market. We imagine them to be our eyes and ears on the ground - and in return, we want to build a community of people enthusiastic about science entrepreneurship and provide some insight on how the VC and startup world works, e.g. by sharing our learnings from running a first-time fund, how we make decisions, negotiate with startups and (hopefully) support them on their path.
🚀 We kicked off our first version of this network at the end of 2023 with 10 brave inaugural scouts - and are currently looking to increase the community even further! Follow this link to read more about who we are looking for. 🚀
Portraits of our current scouts
Our current group of scouts is made up of Master and PhD students, founders and innovation professionals based at universities from France to Finland, and from neuroscience to physics. Get to know them better in the following short portraits (that we will continue to expand over time):
Birte - Hailing from South Africa, Birte is currently a postdoc at ETH Zurich. Here she follows her passion at the intersection of neuroscience, psychiatry and computer science - after a PhD developing diagnostic tools in computational psychiatry, she is now exploring possible startup routes of her own.
Fabian - A citizen of Europe, born in the Netherlands - currently residing in Heidelberg and pursuing a Master’s in Molecular Biosciences. Fabian is highly involved in several biotech startup development initiatives and life science entrepreneurship communities such as iGEM Startups. He has a special interest in neurotech, personalised medicine and organ printing technologies.