Merry Christmas Everyone

After an eventful year, the holidays and the turn of the year allow us to pause for a minute, reminisce on what happened in 2018 and dare to take a look into the future.

In 2018, aescuvest and its investors enabled funding for exciting, innovative and very promising projects such as ImmunoLogik  – a company that develops a lead candidate active pharmaceutical ingredient for the treatment of HIV patients –, moio.care  – an intelligent tele-care system – , or Kata, an app that uses AI and augmented reality to improve the treatment of lung diseases. And it is not only the startups that benefit from the investors’ commitment. If they succeed, investors and patients alike will benefit from these innovations. Let’s just take a look at MediTip-Medical where this win-win-win scenario is already in effect, given the company employs the revenues from its strong distribution to boost its growth. moio.care and Kata on the other hand are on their marks and will launch soon due to the funding rounds here on the German aescuvest platform.

Crowdfunding as a door opener

Often, the initial crowdfunding is just the first step of many to come. The spark that ignites the engine and enables the companies to make moves and present themselves to the public for the first time. Further development though – as in the case of ImmunoLogik for example which relies heavily on research – might take many years and additional rounds of financing in order to trigger revenues. The acquisition of additional funding can be a challenging and exhausting process, startups often desperately browse new sources of funding to keep the lights burning.

In 2018, a few decisive measures were taken to further enhance funding of young enterprises. As part of its CMU initiative (Capital Markets Union), the European Union issued a new set of rules to broaden the pitch for crowdfunding, so to say. Accordingly, in many European countries fundings of up to € 8m do not require a prospectus anymore, taken they go via the issuance of securities, like shares or bonds. While this is a promising first step, we strongly believe that a prospectus-free securities offering on a national level is not an up-to-date solution, given a borderless EU and the internet.

Alongside its partners, aescuvest has come up with a model that allows to fund startups in Europe via a prospectus-based offering of securities – cross-border. By issuing profit participation certificates issued by a special purpose vehicle, on the one hand costs for the startups remain reasonable and on the other hand investors can benefit from a company’s growth throughout the entire process, just like a direct share in the business would.

Crowdfunding 2.0 = Online Venture Capital Participation

A new course to make venture capital available was set in 2018. An agreement between EIT Health and aescuvest enables us to provide an additional funding channel on our new platform aescuvest.eu in the near future where startups can raise venture capital in the range of €500,000 to €10m. The set-up and development of that new platform required lots of resources, thus we are looking forward to finally launch the very first campaign that we expect at the beginning of 2019. Dutch medtech company Surge-on Medical has developed a multi-patented and innovative range of freedimensional surgical instruments with applications in arthroscopy, laparoscopy and robotic surgery. For the commercial launch of the products, Surge-on Medical intends to raise between €2.5 and €5m via aescuvest.eu in early 2019.

We are thrilled to have you on board for this new chapter of aescuvest. Take a ride with us and together we push open doors in the European health market.

Have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year, stay healthy!

Kind regards,

Patrick Pfeffer
Founder & CEO