Healthbox, the incubator owned and directed by Sandbox Industries, the US-based venture capital firm that manages the medical group BlueCross BlueShield Association’s corporate venturing fund, had its inaugural European event in London’s Canary Wharf last week.
Seven start-ups pitched the audience for early stage investment. MIRA Rehab, from Romania, is looking to raise £600,000 ($1m) to develop computer games on the Microsoft Kinect console for use by physiotherapists in the treatment of shoulder and knee rehabilitation. Desktop Genetics, founded by two Cambridge University graduates, has already raised £150,000 ($238,000) from the UK government, Healthbox and from a prize given by Cambridge, to build its automated gene assembly robot, which co-Founder Riley Doyle described as a “biotech Nespresso machine”.
The technology, when fully developed, is claimed to reduce gene assembly time from six weeks to one and increase sequence accuracy 100-fold. They are seeking a further £250,000 to develop the technology over the next four years. The other presenting companies were HomeTouch, Medopad, Portable Medical, Soma Analytics and HealthClinicPlus. Cosmin Mihaiu (pictured) Co-founder and CEO of MiIRA Rehab won a 10,000 prize for his company on the day for the best presentation as voted by the audience.
Healthbox launched in Chicago in 2011 and expanded to Boston and London a few months later. It claims to be Europe’s first business accelerator focused exclusively on innovation and entrepreneurship in healthcare. Twenty-seven of the companies that have been through the programme across the three sites have secured 46 pilot projects. Six of the companies from the Chicago programme alone have raised $2.8m of investment.
The London event was supported by German chemical and pharmaceutical corporate Bayer, British services company Serco, London charity Guy’s and St Thomas’ and British health insurer Bupa. The keynote speaker was Kit Malthouse, deputy mayor of London for Business and Enterprise, who said: “While we love financial services in the way that you might love your dog even when it keeps biting you, London has a second string: science. We have fantastic scientists here, coming out of great universities and supported by organisations like the Wellcome Trust. We want London to be a landing place for science.”