3 Questions on the new design for aescuvest
Our Interviewpartners: Dr. Patrick Pfeffer, CEO, and Jörg Diehl, Head of Strategic Partnerships
A couple of months ago you introduced a digital health investment opportunity on this platform. Now you are re-introducing aescuvest as a company. What happened?
Patrick Pfeffer: aescuvest started off in 2014 to innovate the concept of equity investing by providing an easy-to-use platform to invest smaller amounts of money into promising digital healthcare startups. We very successfully ran crowd investing campaigns and helped a lot of founders and management teams to get their concepts off the ground. One of the campaigns was featured on this site in early 2022, it was about a company who develops a new medical device to significantly improve the quality of services of opticians and ophthalmologists.
However, in recent years we realized that our investor community has evolved to being a community of healthcare experts, from various verticals, and with very deep industry expertise, across borders and even continents. Simply put, we found ourselves having gathered quite a bit of ‘smart’ money around our original business concept. And we decided to leverage this healthcare expertise in the in interest of our investee companies to help them accelerate their path to commercialization, by not only providing them the necessary capital to achieve their next business milestones, but also give them access to industry expertise. In short, we aim to team up with our investors to be active, smart investors, rather than ‘just’ providing financing.
So, what is new at aescuvest?
Jörg Diehl: Basically, we re-bundled our offering to investors, and we stopped doing public crowd-investing campaigns. Instead, we carefully pre-select digital health companies across Europe, according to our tested investment criteria, and we introduce these investment opportunities to a select circle of interested international healthcare investors. Depending on the investment appetite of business angels, family offices, serial entrepreneurs, and corporates, we offer various service levels which are differentiated along the needs of the investor groups: bespoke, customized investment services for corporates, exclusive investment opportunities for our 10xHealth Investment Club Members, and an individualized service package for our aescuvest PRO investors. We also recently acquired a company that enables us to set up Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) as a Service, which is another service capacity we are currently building.
What has not changed?
Patrick Pfeffer: Our DNA as a digital health investor. We continue to believe in the future of digitalized healthcare provision, which enables us to improve clinical processes, boost patient outcomes and provide personalized medicine to prevent disease rather than to cure sickness. We still are providing promising digital health entrepreneurs access to early-stage capital, but on top we are also offering them access to unparalleled industry expertise. Our healthcare-interested investors can build their individual portfolio of digital healthcare assets, easy, transparent, no strings attached.
