1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julien Pham, 3CC Third Culture Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So in that context, what companies have you invested in and what’s going on?

Julien Pham: Yeah. So for Fund One, we’ve invested in 15 companies so far. We’re probably going to invest in another two or three before we kind of wrap up the investment period for Fund One and start investing out of Fund Two. But out of the 15 companies we’ve invested in since 2021, 11 of them are squarely into digital health across different sectors or conditions like mental health and maternal health.

That was 11 of them. Remaining one of them is a tools and manufacturing company specifically for making vaccinations a little bit more efficient and using certain biologics for vaccinations. Two of them are what we call TechBio, which is the application of data and AI for drug discovery rather than BioTech, which is more of traditional molecule discovery using chemistry. There’s a lot of of gray area between what’s BioTech and TechBio today.

The last one is at the intersection of digital health and InsureTech. So it’s technology to empower how do you customize choosing physicians based on the insurance plan that you have. It has a really sophisticated and nuanced approach to that, which we think is the right approach for some populations. So we’re very excited about this last investment.

Now we’re looking at companies doing mental health and a computer vision company for vascular procedures. We continue to see a lot of mental health and women’s health technology. So I would say that those are kind of big buckets.

Sramana Mitra: And these are all selling to hospitals?

Julien Pham: We’re pretty open in terms of who the end user is. The end user is usually going to be the patient, but we call it care delivery rather than particular sectors.

We spent the last ten minutes talking about AI, where AI could be applied, right? There’s just so much convergence of how technologies can be used and how business models converge to provide better care delivery. TechBio is an example of that.

The example I constantly give is, if you’ve got a bunch of BioTech veterans who’ve been working 20-30 years in the industry who say, “We’ve been doing it this way and it’s just so slow and inefficient, there has to be a better way. Why don’t we hire a bunch of ex-Google engineers to help us build a platform for using AI for drug discovery?” So what is that? You probably call that BioTech, because the founding team was from BioTech.

But if you’ve a bunch of ex-Google engineers saying, “We’ve all the skills in the world, we know how to build products and do it really well. Instead of building the next FinTech solution, why don’t we apply this for human goods? And why don’t we apply that for drug discovery?” They build the same engine, but they come from an engineering background. What do you call that then?

Is that TechBio? It is a simplistic example.

This segment is part 5 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julien Pham, 3CC Third Culture Capital
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