“Our best investments are in people,” says CRB Health Tech SGEIC, a venture capital management firm with expertise in biotechnology, medical devices and digital health, headquartered in Madrid and Barcelona. And rightly so — innovation is driven by people, fresh thinking and the ambition to make a difference.
We speak with Samantha López-Mochales, PhD, Investment Associate at CRB Health Tech SGEIC, about what makes a healthtech startup stand out to investors, how to distinguish genuine long-term potential from passing hype, and more.
What makes a healthtech startup truly investable?
At our fund, we like to understand a company and its space in depth before deciding to invest, so the list of boxes to tick is quite long. But for me, there’s a top three. First, the team, both the objective aspects (the founders’ expertise in the field is especially important in health tech, but also previous entrepreneurial experience, and so on) and the subjective ones.
Second, the value proposition and product-market fit. For me, a positive signal is when the problem, and how the company is going to solve it, is easy to understand. But the market also has to be open to disruption, which is not that easy in healthcare, and big enough without being too crowded.
And third, I like to see a clear path to scale, one that gives me confidence in an exit within a reasonable time frame and at a good multiple.
The intersection of health and technology is a booming sector, but what will separate lasting value from the hype?
There’s one term that comes up a lot in our dealflow discussions: technological defensibility. In the era of generative and agentic AI, there’s a lot of uncertainty about how this market will evolve over the coming years, and about what will allow a product to hold its value as it becomes easier and easier to build your own tools.
For me, some of the pillars of defensibility today are data ownership (high-quality proprietary datasets to train your models), robust clinical evidence and regulatory clearance, and, of course, non-AI components such as hardware innovation.
Is Europe turning its scientific leadership into investable businesses at scale?
Not enough, not yet. There’s still a lot to do, both in terms of legislation, at EU and national level, and in terms of mindset, both collective and individual.
Many patents are generated in Europe but then licensed to companies outside Europe. Researchers should understand the path from university innovation to a market-ready product from the early stages of their careers, or even during their undergraduate studies.
Universities also have a duty to build bridges with industry, to collaborate within open innovation frameworks, and to show companies that what is created in research programs is valuable to them as well.
In digital health, is it worse to back the wrong innovation or to back the right one too late?
From a return-on-investment perspective, at the single-company level, I think it’s worse to back the wrong innovation, because that will probably take your return to zero. But backing the right innovation too late isn’t ideal either. Once the market is crowded, companies arriving late to the party have limited options to win a position, and that leads to poor returns for us too.
We aim to back the right innovations early enough, which means accepting the risk of misjudging what “good” innovation is. That’s what due diligence is for: maximizing the probability of choosing innovation that is truly good, that can become a market leader, and getting the most out of our investment.
Can a technology deliver real value to patients yet fail to attract investors?
Yes. Value for patients is not the same as value for payers, although regulation and reimbursement pathways play a key role in aligning the two, by financially rewarding innovations that improve patient survival and quality of life. That’s why the same innovation can be attractive in some European countries but not in the US, or vice versa.
The regulatory and reimbursement frameworks are different, even if the technology helps all patients equally. Generally, what isn’t economically viable isn’t attractive to investors either, although there are impact funds that put patient benefit first and are willing to accept more modest financial returns in exchange.
Will the next healthcare breakthrough come from a laboratory, a software platform, or something else?
Probably from a combination of things. The population is aging and facing more chronic disease, so we need new treatments both for the diseases we already know and for those still to come. Technology is accelerating and scaling drug discovery.
Although we’ve reached point where we’re even creating synthetic patients for clinical trials from real patient data, we’ll still need the full in silico–in vitro–in vivo continuum to move forward. So rather than the lab or the software platform alone, I think the breakthrough will come from both working together.
