Nobody Funds Science

A step back from the governance series to talk about the thing that keeps founders awake at 3am.

I'm writing this from a hotel room in Lisbon, preparing for BIO-Europe Spring. Somewhere in this city over breakfast, a scientific founder is rehearsing a pitch that opens with a mechanism slide. I know, because I've helped many such founders prepare for exactly this moment. And the most important thing I've learned, from their experiences and my own, is something that sounds heretical coming from a biotech CEO.

Nobody funds science.

I know how that sounds. You've spent a career in the lab. Your mechanism is elegant. Your data is clean. Your target is validated. You believe, with the conviction that comes from deep expertise, that if you just explain the science clearly enough, the money will follow.

It won't.

I've sat across the table from hundreds of investors over a decade. The ones who wrote cheques didn't write them because the science was better. They wrote them because the story was better. The science was evidence. It was never the pitch.

This is not a cynical observation. It's a practical one. And if you're a scientific founder preparing to raise capital for the first time, understanding this distinction is the single most important thing you can do before you open your mouth.

Scientific founders pitch mechanisms. They explain targets, pathways, binding affinities, selectivity data. They walk investors through the biology in painstaking detail because, to them, the biology is the point. It is the thing they've spent years understanding. It is the thing that makes their company worth building.

The investor is thinking about something else entirely.

They're thinking: what is the market? Who are the patients? What do they pay? Who else is in the space? What happens if this works? What happens if it doesn't? How do I get my money back, and when?

I've watched brilliant scientists lose investor attention in the first three minutes because they opened with a mechanism slide instead of a patient. I've seen founders spend twenty minutes explaining a target without once mentioning the disease it treats. I've done it myself, early in my career, and I still remember the polite glazing-over of eyes as I explained a pathway nobody in the room was qualified to evaluate.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: most generalist life sciences investors cannot evaluate your mechanism. They don't have the training. They aren't stupid. They're simply operating in a domain where the mechanism is one data point among many, and rarely the decisive one. What they can evaluate is the market, the competitive position, the team, and the narrative. If those four things work, they'll find a KOL to validate the science.

Lead with the patient. Build to the market. Use the mechanism as proof. Not the other way around.

The second lesson took me longer to learn, and it cost more.

When you're raising for the first time, the temptation is to take money from whoever offers it. You've been rejected forty times. You're burning personal savings. Your co-founder is questioning whether to go back to academia. Then someone says yes. The relief is overwhelming. You want to say yes back.

Stop.

The wrong investor on your cap table is more dangerous than no investor at all. I don't say this lightly. I've seen companies destroyed not by science failures or market shifts but by investors whose incentives didn't align with the company's mission. Controlling shareholders who blocked transformative deals because dilution threatened their percentage. Board members who couldn't evaluate the science but demanded strategic authority over it. Investors whose time horizon didn't match the development timeline, creating pressure to cut corners, slash programmes, and optimise for a quick exit rather than building genuine value.

I wrote in the last article about how "focus" gets weaponised to justify destroying platform value. That pattern almost always originates with an investor whose fund life doesn't accommodate the company's development timeline. A seven-year fund investing in a programme that needs ten years to reach value inflection will, inevitably, push for decisions that serve the fund, not the company. They'll call it "focus." They'll mean "we need to exit."

Choose your investors more carefully than they choose you. Ask about fund life. Ask about follow-on capacity. Ask about their track record when things go wrong, not when they go right. Talk to CEOs they've backed who hit setbacks. That conversation will tell you everything the pitch meeting won't.

The third lesson is the one nobody talks about at conferences, because it's not glamorous.

Non-dilutive funding, grants, government programmes, partnerships, is not a consolation prize for companies that can't attract venture capital. It is a strategic weapon that changes the power dynamics of every subsequent negotiation.

Every euro of grant funding you secure before your equity raise is a euro of runway you don't need to sell at whatever valuation the market offers. It extends your timeline. It gives you leverage. It lets you say no to the wrong term sheet.

I know the objections. Grants are slow. The applications are brutal. The reporting requirements consume time you don't have. All true. Do it anyway. Because the company that enters a Series A negotiation with eighteen months of grant-funded runway is in a fundamentally different position from the one that enters with six months of cash left and no alternatives.

At Santero, we've built a funding architecture that treats non-dilutive capital as a core strategic pillar, not an afterthought. Regional grants fund our earliest validation work. International programmes like CARB-X offer both capital and credibility. Partnership discussions create optionality that strengthens our hand in equity conversations. None of this happened by accident. It happened because we designed the funding strategy before we designed the pitch deck.

I'm going to say something that will upset some founders: your Series A valuation doesn't matter nearly as much as you think it does.

What matters is the quality of your investor syndicate, the terms that govern your relationship, and whether the people around your table will help you build a company or spend the next five years trying to control one.

I've seen founders spend months negotiating an extra two million on the pre-money, then sign terms that gave their lead investor effective veto over every strategic decision. They optimised for the number and ignored the structure. Two years later, the board dynamics that those terms created had done more damage than the extra dilution ever could have.

Valuation is a number. Governance is a system. Systems compound. Numbers don't.

If your lead investor understands your science, has the patience for your development timeline, brings operational value beyond capital, and structures the deal in a way that preserves your ability to run the company, take the lower number. You'll thank yourself in three years when you're making hard decisions and the people around the table are helping rather than obstructing.

The final lesson is about time.

Most founders think about fundraising as an event. You prepare for six months, raise for six months, close, then go back to running the company. This is wrong.

Fundraising is a continuous process. The investors you meet today who say no might say yes in eighteen months when your data matures. The relationships you build at conferences compound over years, not weeks. The CEO who sends a quarterly update to investors who passed, keeping them informed, sharing milestones, staying visible, is the CEO who has a warm pipeline when the next raise begins.

I'm at BIO-Europe this week not because I expect to close a deal over coffee. I'm here because the relationships I build this week will pay off in six, twelve, or eighteen months. Every meeting is a data point. Every conversation is a seed. The founders who treat conferences as transactional events, scanning badges for the right fund name, leave with business cards. The ones who treat them as relationship-building opportunities leave with something far more valuable: people who will remember them when the timing is right.

If I could go back and talk to the version of myself preparing for his first biotech fundraise, I would say this:

Your science is necessary. It is not sufficient. Learn to tell the story in the language your audience speaks, not the language you're most comfortable with. Choose your investors with the same rigour you applied to choosing your target. Treat non-dilutive funding as a strategic advantage, not a backup plan. Care less about the valuation and more about the terms. And start building relationships eighteen months before you need them.

The biotech industry has a mythology that great science attracts great capital. It doesn't. Great science combined with a clear commercial narrative, the right investor partners, and a disciplined funding strategy attracts great capital. The science is the foundation. Everything else is the building.

If you're a scientific founder preparing to raise, build the building. The foundation is already there.

Mark

This is an interlude in the governance series, written from BIO-Europe Spring in Lisbon. The series continues next with what gets lost when founders are pushed out, and what happens when one gets a second chance.

I write Beards on Biotech because I've built biotechs, watched them fail, and I'm still learning. If you're a scientific founder navigating your first raise, I'd like to hear how it's going.