What are the challenges of building a tech x bio company in Germany? 🇩🇪 ↓ see what our founders thought ↓ 🍽 🍷 ✨ Another great evening at our latest future.bio dinner in Berlin, held alongside DEEP - Institute for Deep Tech Innovation and a fantastic group of #founders in techbio. The discussion revolved around early-stage company formation and whether, at the point of translation, the barriers are low enough to retain tech within the German ecosystem. 🛠 Problems in Tech Transfer • Lack of standardisation - as with many other countries, poor transparency around spin-out terms and processes across research centres. • Limited Education - IP-generating hubs lack programmes to educate students about entrepreneurship and inspire company formation. • Misaligned Incentives - some TTOs openly optimise for the licensing fees they generate from their portcos (over progress/impact), whilst others demand milestone payments for company progress, essentially penalising growth. 📝 Challenges of Company Administration • Incorporation - excessively high barriers to setting up a GmbH, costing ~25,000€. Compare this to £50 in the UK. • Notaries - anyone who’s founded in Germany knows the pain of notaries. As well as a surprisingly large cost and admin burden, notarised processes add another barrier to accessing foreign capital, where simple paperwork mistakes can cost months of lost time and thousands of euros. • Taxation - the current tax framework limits choices that founders and companies have for moving to other countries or holding structures, for fear of extortionate personal taxation. 🇺🇸 US vs EU 🇩🇪 Ecosystem • Capital - as always in this debate, access to capital is seen as a bottleneck to growth in the EU and an accelerant in the US. • Vision - "There's something in the water over there". Founders feel a fundamental difference in the scale of ambition and vision in the US, and perhaps a lack of voices who encourage/validate these moonshot ideas within the EU ecosystem. Thank you to all our #founders for your input! Mitchell Duffy Thore Buergel Cuong To Christian Wirsching Aarón Xerach Herrera Martín Iris Wing To Lam Francesca Baillieu Zoe Peden Stay tuned for the next one London 🇬🇧
Zoe Peden
2mo
was lovely to get the show on the road in Berlin!
Thank you Jonty Corrin and future.bio for organizing such a nice event. It was a lovely exchange and I´m already looking forward to the next time!
Intrinsic Curiosity | Startups & Investments | Physical Chemist| 2xMother | Wife
1moAmazing to see bio VC investors, such a rare sight on my LinkedIn... Check out biotech and pharma, health and medtech Labena Ventures accelerator