Venture Café London’s Post

In partnership with Global Tech Advocates (GTA) HealthTech, we hosted Zero to One: Driving Validation for Early-Stage Healthtech, and the panel cut straight to what founders actually need to hear. 🔎 What does evidence really mean at an early stage? For Livi (THENA Capital), evidence means demonstration of real potential: founding team background, how they've handled pivots, signals that this is a team that can manage change. For Varaidzo (Vee) (NIHR), it means the technology doing what it says on the tin, for the specific population it's claiming to serve. For Gianpaolo (Helix Centre), it's getting an answer to your hypothesis by whatever means and then making it more robust. Even just talking to people is the beginning of validation. For Youssof (Curistica), it starts with safety: before your product touches a patient, you need to have mapped exactly how it can go wrong, how to identify and mitigate this. Right at the beginning, when you write your intended use statement. 👩🏻⚕️ Understanding the NHS as a market The NHS is not a single market, and people consistently submit solutions to the wrong problem. Vee gave a great example: founders building scheduling software to fix waiting times, when the real problem is that patients can't be safely monitored at home so discharge takes longer. Talk to clinicians to find the actual gap. Gianpaolo's advice to immerse yourself in the problem and bring consumers and users into the design process itself will really help with this. 📈 The most dangerous part of validation Vanity metrics are the biggest trap: engagement figures, global reach numbers, enthusiastic clinical champions. Jenni (Building Bones): people liking your solution is not the same as people paying for it and integrating it. 💸 On willingness to pay and market size Livi was direct: "The problem needs to be big enough that someone will pay you to solve it repeatedly." Reimbursement pathways matter, medtech is highly customised, and as Jenni added: the person using your solution and the person paying for it are frequently different people, which means you need a separate value proposition for each. And look at NICE early assessment reports, they map competitor evidence and gaps in the field, and they're freely available. 💭 One thing the ecosystem needs to understand earlier Thinking about safety is free, do it at the beginning. It signals seriousness and builds trust. Investors should be patient and realistic about what evidence early-stage founders can actually provide. And make sure you're solving the right problem, because the technology doesn't matter if it isn't. A big thank you to Dr Isabel for chairing the brilliant panel, and to OnTrack (www.ontrackrehab.com), neubond, Precision Microbubbles, and Building Bones for showcasing!