Blog Archive - Page 12 of 13

6 Investment Trends That Could Emerge From the COVID-19 Pandemic

There is still capital to be deployed in categories that interested investors before the pandemic, which may set the new order in a post-COVID-19 world.

Some epidemiologists have estimated that COVID-19 cases will peak in April, but PitchBook reports that dealmaking was down -26% in March, compared to February’s weekly average. The decline is likely to continue in coming weeks — many of the deals that closed last month were initiated before the pandemic, and there is a lag between when deals are made and when they are announced.

In the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rocio Wu explores how the rapidly unfolding situation may affect prevailing investment trends for TechCrunch.

Originally published in TechCrunch. Read the full story here.

Will China’s Coronavirus-Related Trends Shape the Future for American VCs?

Despite early signs of a recovery among some investors and consumers who remained largely optimistic, the COVID-19 outbreak will likely have a significant impact on China’s tech sector as a whole.

For the past month, VC investment pace seems to have slacked off in the U.S., but deal activities in China are picking up following a slowdown prompted by the COVID-19 outbreak.

In the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rocio Wu looks to the Chinese market to see if American investors can anticipate the virus’ effect in their own markets.

Originally published in TechCrunch. Read the full story here.

Toast, the Restaurant Industry and an Exceptional Case for Vertical Payments

Two weeks ago Toast announced its $400M raise on a $4.9B valuation, and for the first time, I feel that people outside the restaurant industry realized just what an amazing company Toast has become. It is an exceptional example of vertical payments and well on its way to becoming an industry platform.

At F-Prime Capital, we invested in the first institutional round of capital in 2015, and before and after, we have looked at dozens of other industries for vertical SaaS + payments opportunities. Few combined the magic ingredients that made Toast so successful. We got a lot of things right about the restaurant industry in our original investment thesis and got lucky on others, but overall we have learned so much more about building vertical software businesses.

This post is about why the restaurant sector has been an ideal industry for vertical payments and how Toast executed against it so well. I hope it also helps founders building vertical payments businesses in other industries to distinguish good from great verticals, how timing matters and how to judge how high the ceiling can be. I’ll organize the rest of my thoughts into Market, Team, and Timing.

In the beginning…

As with all breakout successes, the story starts with a great team and great execution. Chris Comparato, Steve Fredette, Tim Barash, Aman Narang and Jonathan Grimm are superb operators and have built an amazing team around them. They were united first by Steve Papa, Founder/CEO of Endeca, where they helped build Endeca to a $1.1B sale to Oracle. Then Steve backed them as their primary investor until 2015 at Toast. Talk about founders giving back and creating new founders.

Rock, paper, scissors. Market, team, timing.

It does not happen without a great team, but never underestimate market and timing. They make the difference between good and great companies.

Market

#1. High velocity sales cycle meets architectural shift to the cloud. Restaurants form and fold all the time. Successful restaurants add new locations. On average, 10,000–20,000 new restaurants start every year. Selling into the restaurant industry gives a startup a lot of shots on goal, often without the need to displace any vendors. In addition, the restaurant industry tended to refresh on-prem point-of-sale (POS) systems every five to seven years. That was both an indictment of on-prem, server-based software, but also a natural result of POS terminals obsoleting as technologies and security improved (e.g., EMV).

That said, Toast launched as all industries were moving to the cloud and this refresh in the restaurant industry was going to be different. Square had already introduced cloud + tablet-based POSs in 2009 to coffee shops and mom-and-pop stores, and nearly all quick-service and full-service restaurants would refresh to a cloud-based solution. Enter Toast with a purpose-built, all-in-one cloud-based solution.

#2 Era of the Payment Facilitators (Payfacs). By 2012 when Toast launched, the payment facilitator (Payfac) model was flourishing and this allowed Toast to redefine the POS business model and literally alter the competitive playing field. By embedding payments into their software stack, they were given two levers for charging customers — SaaS licenses and payments interchange. Restaurants were going to pay someone interchange, but now Toast could give them their core software platform for running the restaurant while also monetizing the payments. Providing an all-in-one solution offered value to both the restaurant and Toast.

A bonus of vertical payments in the restaurant industry is the low-risk profile. Compared to a marketplace like Etsy or Stripe’s broad customer base, restaurants are relatively easy to KYC, chargeback risk is low and transaction monitoring is more predictable.

#3 Geographic density leads to viral growth. Consumer businesses search for viral growth, but few enterprise businesses enjoy the same, though there are notable exceptions (e.g., Atlassian, Slack, Asana). Early on we found that achieving density in a city actually stimulated organic growth and higher sales productivity. Restaurant owners dine at other restaurants. Waiters and waitresses move from restaurant to restaurant. This was a remarkable phenomenon to watch and a beautiful characteristic of the restaurant industry.

Team

#4 I will be a platform when I grow up. With the shift to the cloud, Toast had the chance to re-define the product category from standalone POS terminals to a true software platform with APIs and a world of best of breed partners and applications. Not only did this allow Toast to offer more value to restaurants, but it planted the seeds of its own enhanced role as a platform layer in the industry.

#5 An enterprise team for an enterprise-grade market. I’ve found that quick-service (QSR) full-service restaurants (FSR) have just the right amount of enterprise complexity. Managing one, if not many locations, presents ample complexity, including: menus, cook stations, staffing, customer CRM, inventory, procurement, etc. Coming from Endeca, the Toast team built with an enterprise software mindset and an obsession for customer success. This is one of the main reasons it’s been difficult for Square to move upmarket.

I say ‘the right amount of complexity’ because I have found other attractive verticals, like hotels, are sufficiently big beasts, built around all-encompassing property management systems and are hard to displace without feature parity. Too much complexity and a startup has a hard time penetrating.

#6 Android, not Apple. Many of Toast’s competitors went to market with Apple tablets. They were the rage and looked beautiful. But we all know the cost of that brand. Toast understood that Android-based devices would follow a much faster cost curve while offering an order of magnitude more options for supply and configuration. While that choice seemed obvious to Toast, not all competitors saw it that way, including Revel and Touch Bistro.

Timing

#7 The restaurant sector got hot. It didn’t hurt that venture firms would go on to invest $3.4B in restaurant tech startups starting in 2014. Led by online delivery services like GrubHub and DoorDash, hundreds of startups formed to serve restaurants, both enabled by cloud-based POSs, which permitted easier integrations, and reinforcing the role of POSs as the new platform layer.

#8 Access to cheap capital. What a time we’re living in. Good teams understand the capital markets. Toast recognized that it could raise a lot of capital based on its strong unit economics, impressive go-to-market execution and large market opportunity. When you see an opportunity to be a platform, it is rational to press your advantage and gain market share.

The Future is Bright

As exciting as the first five years have been, the restaurant industry is still in the early innings of its shift to the cloud and vertical payments. Older, incumbent vendors like NCR and Oracle/Micros constitute most of the POS market.

This first phase has so much upside left. Mirroring the phenomenon I described of density leading to viral growth, the restaurant POS will have a winner-take-most outcome. Even incumbent vendors enjoyed that. Peak market shares were ~30% for NCR and 21% for Micros, with Toast on its way to winning its own significant market share.

The second phase involves the POS as a platform — the software central nervous system for the restaurant. Toast already has become a hub for third-party applications like staffing and inventory management. In five years, restaurants will not have two, three or four tablets on the counter for GrubHub, DoorDash, Caviar and others.

At the same time, Toast and others will offer additional services themselves. Toast acquired payroll provider Stratex and launched Toast Capital in December. I’m especially excited to see the suite of FinTech services Toast will offer to restaurant owners and employees. The POS is a fraction of the addressable market at each restaurant. As a public company, Square has continued to grow net revenue 60% Y/Y even as it surpasses $1.5B. The unit economics of QSR and FSR are several times more attractive than the smaller retailers that comprise Square’s customer base.

The restaurant industry has proven to be an ideal market for vertical payments and the ceiling for players like Toast is very high.

10 Rules Entrepreneurs Need to Know Before Adopting AI

It is in the ethos of established tech companies to build generic solutions for customers across industries. But for challengers, the more they can focus on solving core business problems, the more successful they will be.

Although adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for the enterprise is still in the early days, the technology has matured enough for entrepreneurs to start gathering inspiration and evaluating opportunities for potential applications.

Business leaders are just beginning to adopt artificial intelligence and machine learning into their operations. In this story for Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge, Rocio Wu offers insights into how entrepreneurs can start riding the wave.

Originally published in HBS Working Knowledge. Read the full story here.

Founders Diaries: The stories keep getting better….

We have been enthralled with the response of the Boston start-up community.

We are hosting our next Founders Diaries event on Monday Feb 10 with Jeremy Allaire of Allaire Corp/Brightcove/Circle fame – we would love to see you there! Register to attend here.

How time flies….

It has been 3 years (!) since we launched the Founders Diaries event series, and we have been enthralled with the response of the Boston start-up community. What started as a single inspirational talk by Robin Chase from Zipcar and a data-heavy blog post from our team has become a much larger tradition, and one we have been fortunate to share with 1,000+ attendees to date.

Accomplished start-up leaders like Michael Simon from LogMeIn, Steve Papa from Endeca, Paul Sagan from Akamai, David Cancel from Drift, and a multitude of others have been extraordinarily generous in sharing their trials, tribulations, and victories on the way to building foundational Boston companies. Those gathered have shared in laughs, heart-wrenching stories (Akamai losing a co-founder to tragedy on 9/11, whose memory inspired the team for years to come), ‘wows’ (LogMeIn’s picture-perfect early growth #s in spite of early rejection from investors), and tales of culture reigning supreme (Datto’s Austin McChord wins the award for most creative in-office competitions/races). We are deeply appreciative of not only our speakers but those who come to listen, ask questions, and share their own stories over apps and drinks.

Up Next: Good things come in 3’s…

Our next distinguished speaker, Jeremy Allaire, earns the unique commendation of having started 3 (3!!) successful start-ups, displaying a relentless determination to build products, hire teams, and close customers across decades.

Jeremy started his entrepreneurial journey as Co-Founder/CTO of Allaire Corporation, where he led the company’s product and GTM strategy and helped grow the business to 1M customers, $120M+ revenue, and a sale to Macromedia in late 2000. After serving as CTO of Macromedia, he then moved into online video distribution as Founder/CEO of Brightcove (from inception through the IPO), building a $130M+ revenue company that today powers video on ~25% of the top 10k websites worldwide and receives 250M+ unique visits per month. In his latest act (we won’t dare call it final at this point!), Jeremy co-founded and serves as CEO of Circle, a crypto finance company that makes it possible for people everywhere to create and share value in a way that is affordable, open and empowering.

From web application servers to online video to crypto, Jeremy has identified and harnessed trends in a way that few can.

Empowering the next generation….

When first examining the data on ‘large exits’ ($400M+) in Boston from the past 25 years, what stood out most is how certain companies serve as fertile ground for successive entrepreneurial endeavors, similar to the ‘Paypal mafia’. The initial assessment (including valuable crowdsourced additions) highlighted Akamai (40+ alumni start-ups), Genzyme (28), and Hubspot (28) as launchpoints for entrepreneurial leaders. Jeremy’s companies similarly stand out. Allaire Corp, Brightcove, and Circle have collectively produced 33 alumni start-ups from their employee ranks (counting founders/early start-up CEOs).

A few fun facts about these alumni adventures (listed here – contributions welcome!):

-8 multiple-time entrepreneurs on the list

-6 alumni companies had 2 or more co-founders from the Allaire Corp/Brightcove/Circle mafia (‘no new friends’, as they say)

-JJ Allaire (Jeremy’s brother) co-founded Allaire Corp and has founded three subsequent companies: Onfolio, FitNow, and R-Studio

-Notable outcomes include EqualLogic ($1.4B to Dell; co-founded by Paula Long) and Imprivata (IPO then $544M sale to Thoma Bravo; Patrick Morley led as early President/CEO); both are Allaire Corp alums (Paula in engineering, Patrick on the business side)

-The group also includes a few high-potential, high-growth companies including Mux ($32M raised from YC, Accel), RStudio (millions of users, the default IDE for R, recently became a public benefit corp), Vested (an early-stage company re-imagining employee stock options), and Hummingbird (taking a new approach to RegTech, an area near/dear close to our heart)

-David Orfao served as President/CEO of Allaire Corp through its sale to Macromedia before co-founding General Catalyst, a leading VC firm; General Catalyst has funded at least 7 of the Allaire-related alumni start-ups (here’s to paying it forward!)

Alumni Start-ups: Notable Exits

Alumni Start-ups to Watch

Despite all the entrepreneurial activity and success to date, we are sure to see even more in the future from those in the ‘Allaire’ mafia (we are watching you, Circle alumni, for great things)!

Join us….

We hope you’ll join us on Monday February 10th to hear Jeremy’s wisdom, and maybe even cross paths with an alumni founder! Please sign up here to attend – see you there and at future gatherings!

– Team F-Prime

Kudos to Nisha Rangarajan for key research and analysis in support of this post.

Sources: LinkedIn, Pitchbook, Crunchbase, and VentureFizz.

Retooling the Lab-Software Stack

Day-to-day software used by scientists remains stuck in the dark ages.

While great strides have been made in biomedical research over the past decade with breakthrough technologies like CRISPR and gene therapy, the day-to-day software used by scientists remains stuck in the dark ages.

On a product-level, legacy lab-software is often difficult to deploy (anyone heard of SaaS?), terrible to integrate (API still means Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient) and shockingly bad from a UI/ UX perspective (think Pong from 1972). On a functional level, it’s often unfit for modern data-types/ data-volumes and lacking in embedded intelligence (i.e. AI/ML). Software may be eating the world in other industries, but it only ever nibbled at the R&D lab.

Thankfully, over the last few years we’ve seen a new breed of start-up emerge looking to overhaul the lab-software stack. These companies are built on modern tech foundations and tend to be product-led with freemium, self-serve versions that delight users not dissuade them. Several F-Prime portfolio companies exemplify these traits: Benchling has thoroughly modernized what a Lab Operating System should look, feel and function like; Owkin is empowering scientists to create predictive models for drug efficacy; and BenchSci (our newest investment) has mapped the world’s biomedical research to improve the efficiency of reagent selection and experiment design.

The DNA of this new breed of start-ups is also fundamentally different. They’re demographically younger (born in the web). They’re educational ‘dual-citizens’ (fluent in Biological Sciences and Computer Science). And they bring a healthy disregard for incumbent vendors in the R&D market (they’re “in the world, but not of it”).

The challenge of commercializing biomedical research is well understood by everyone involved (e.g., high profile clinical failures, experimental irreproducibility and escalating costs of drug development). While better lab software is clearly not THE answer, it is AN answer. It’s an exciting time to be building a company in this vertical and if you’re doing so, we’d love to hear from you.

Whatfix: A New Breed of Global SaaS Start-up

Whatfix

Enterprise SaaS has been a prolific sector for start-up creation over the last decade. Billions of dollars invested, and billions of dollars returned to investors and employees. Notably, almost all in the US. However, enterprise SaaS is becoming a global opportunity, both in terms of target markets and company creation. Through our investments teams across the globe, F-Prime and EightRoads are in the unique position of being at the forefront of investing in these global enterprise SaaS opportunities. We are excited to announce our most recent joint investment in Whatfix, a company we believe can become the next great global SaaS company.

The Whatfix Digital Adoption Platform

Whatfix, a company started in Bangalore, India, is helping define a new class of software user experience for customers across the globe. Historically, software user experience was mostly an afterthought; when the alternative is paper and pencil or spreadsheets, the bar for delivering a high-quality user experience is low. However, as spend on software by enterprises has increased, and the software is increasingly a key driver of operational excellence, there is an acute need to find better ways to drive digital adoption and to ensure employees are deriving full value from the software. Legacy approaches of off-line training, support desks, and help documentation were never very effective, and the ‘consumerization of IT’ means today’s employees expect software to be intuitive to use.

Whatfix helps solve the digital adoption challenge with their contextual, in-app support tools. Across any enterprise application, Whatfix’s product suite enables delivery of support at the exact time the user needs it and at the precise place in the application where it is needed. The support can also be personalized to the user’s past behavior (e.g., first time user) or to their role in the organization. In addition, product usage analytics enable Whatfix to help identify the most commonly used features and the most commonly faced issues to enable further improvement of business processes. Through this suite of capabilities, hundreds of Whatfix customers are already seeing significant uplift of employee engagement across their key enterprise software tools, including Salesforce, Oracle, and Workday.

One of the most interesting aspects of Whatfix’s product is they collect robust usage data across a suite of enterprise applications. Looking ahead, they expect to leverage this unique data asset to provide predictive support, anticipating challenges employees will face, and to automate much of the tedious work of accessing and maintaining data across these applications.

Building a global product business out of India

Whatfix is a true pioneer of the next generation of global enterprise SaaS companies from India. While the technical talent from India has always been world-class, building global product businesses has been a longer journey. However, the last several years has seen the emergence of several significant success stories, such as Freshworks and Druva. Given the best-in-class SaaS growth metrics and unit economics that Whatfix already enjoys, we believe they are well on their way to joining this elite group.

The path Whatfix founders, Khadim and Vara, took to build the company is one we hope many future entrepreneurs from India can learn from. Here are a few of the key decisions they’ve made:

Rapid product iteration and customer feedback: Khadim and Vara have personally spent significant time with their global customers to get feedback on early versions of the product and to ensure product market fit at every step of the product lifecycle

Hiring entrepreneurial leaders: recognizing the lack of experienced hires in India who have built global SaaS businesses, they prioritized hiring leaders with entrepreneurial experience, who bring not only a deep sense of ownership to their roles, but also a willingness to learn and innovate best practices

Building a low-cost inside sales team in India: capitalizing on the increased willingness of enterprises to buy products through an inside sales-led approach, Whatfix has continuously optimized the sales hiring profile, sales pitch, and lead nurturing process to successfully sell high five-figure and even six-figure deals out of India. This has been a critical stepping stone to eventually building a high-impact field sales team in the US

Setting up in the US in the early days of the company: early in the life of the company, once they validated product market fit, Vara relocated to the US and Vispi, an early investor, joined as head of sales, based in the US. Investing early in being close to the customer not only helped build credibility for the company with international customers, but it also tightened the cycle of product feedback

Continuously learning: Khadim and Vara have been true students of building a global start-up, proactively finding mentors amongst many of the leading SaaS entrepreneurs in India and also seeking out guidance from experienced global executives across every functional area

Whatfix is a remarkable company, both in terms of the value they bring to their clients and in their ability to chart their own path to building a global company. We are fortunate to be investors, and we are excited to partner with Khadim and Vara on the next leg of their journey!

Plaid Acquires Quovo — Another Brick in the New Financial Services Tech Stack

Last year I gave a talk at a FinTech Sandbox event about the new financial services tech stack, showing Quovo and Plaid emerging as the new data access layer. Last week, less than one year later, news broke that Plaid acquired Quovo for over $200M. This new infrastructure layer feels solidified.

F-Prime Capital co-led Quovo’s Series B round and I have had the joy of working with co-founders Lowell Putnam and Niko Karvounis as they willed their way through the challenging early years when no one but financial advisors cared about account aggregation, and later as they surfed the tsunami of new applications incorporating account authentication and aggregation. They did it with grit, humility and class.

In the future, I think we will look back on the Quovo-Plaid merger as a significant milestone in the FinTech wave of disruption. For one, I believe the combined Quovo-Plaid will become the data access layer in the new financial services tech stack. In addition, this merger is happening at the same time as authentication and aggregation move from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must have,’ and as we transition from building out the infrastructure to delivering analytics and insights. We are moving from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2, but it won’t stop there.

A quick view on the past, present and future.

Chapter 1: new consumer financial data infrastructure. Together Quovo and Plaid have helped millions of consumers connect their financial accounts to services like Venmo, Coinbase, Betterment and to a long tail of other financial service providers. They connect to over 14,000 financial institutions and provide clean consumer transaction data via APIs, making it easy for consumers to add a bank account for payments (e.g., Venmo), transfer funds into their brokerage account (e.g., Stash), see their categorized spend in budgeting tools (e.g., Personal Capital) and power frictionless rewards programs (e.g., Drop). They are literally everywhere consumers touch a financial service. They do not move money; but they provide the metadata, and in the process have enabled hundreds of new FinTech applications and services.

As a combined entity they will continue to build out the infrastructure in the US and soon the world, but we are already well on our way to Plaid and Quovo owning the data access layer of the new financial services stack.[i]

Chapter 2: analytics and insights. What do you do once you have poured the foundation? You build on top. Plaid and Quovo are now helping businesses analyze consumer data to make better decisions in an automated, real-time way. Lenders like SoFi use Quovo to estimate W-2 income when a consumer applies for a loan, rather than asking for tax returns. Stash uses Quovo to predict the best day to move funds from a consumer’s bank account to help them avoid overdraft fees. Insurance companies can quickly authenticate a policy holder’s bank account to direct deposit insurance proceeds, rather than sending a check. The surface area is wide and Plaid and Quovo should someday generate 3–4x more revenue from derived insights embedded into business workflow.

Chapter 3: what’s next? One inevitable path is for Plaid and Quovo to give consumers more tools to control access to their financial data. In all of my examples, consumers proactively permission use of their data, but what do they do afterwards? Consumers will need easy dashboards to track and revoke access when for instance they no longer use a service. Plaid and Quovo will be well-positioned to do this on behalf of consumers and may become consumer brands themselves in the process. The combined entity can turn over many other cards and it’s exciting to consider other ways they could leverage their data access and analytics, such as, to support identity or credit verification.

Closing thoughts

There are many issues to navigate, from Open Banking in Europe to privacy and regulatory concerns in the US, but I’m optimistic that the triad of regulators, financial institutions and data access providers will act sensibly and with consumers’ interests in mind. If so, the combined Plaid and Quovo has a tremendous future ahead.

And if all goes well, in several years closing documents for company mergers will not require investors to submit their bank account numbers in writing…the final irony in the merger of the two leaders in digital account authentication.

[i] To be fair, time did not start with Quovo and Plaid, and for more than a decade Yodlee (now part of Envestnet) was the data access layer and one of the great early FinTech success stories.

A student was tasked with sending his international tuition payment to the university — but the entire process lacked transparency.

While preparing to attend MIT in 2008, an international student was tasked with sending his international tuition payment to the university – but the entire process lacked transparency.

His payment couldn’t be tracked, so he had to hope that it would be delivered before the deadline—if it was delivered at all. The payment was subject to fees and fluctuating exchange rates, affecting the total amount that would be actually delivered. Wire transfers rarely included essential student information universities required to post funds correctly. Schools frequently received insufficient funds because of the wire fees, and had to send additional bills to students or bar them from registering for classes. Confident a better process could exist, Flywire was created.

Flywire partners with schools and hospitals to receive payments from around the world, easily reconcile them with their accounting systems, and provide consumers with a seamless payment experience.

Mike Massaro was an early employee leading sales for Flywire that became CEO at the same time F-Prime invested in its Series A round. Mike has led the company to tremendous growth in the education sector and lead its successful expansion into the healthcare industry as well. It’s a world leader in vertical payments, having processed over $8 billion for 1,600 institutions.

Flywire aligned well with F-Prime’s investment theme of vertical payments. Flywire is a leading example of solving a simple problem with a great user experience and an elegant, scalable business model. Mike has built a truly global company with a culture of transparency, empowerment and authenticity. Flywire is headquartered in Boston with operations in London, Manchester, Valencia, Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo, Cluj, Sydney, and Chicago.

Neurodegenerative disease has remained an undefeated adversary for too long.

That needed to change. Through our affiliate FBRI, F-Prime has had a long-standing commitment to cure neurodegenerative diseases. But all previous disease-modifying trials in this arena had failed. In the past decade, though, major scientific insights into the underlying genetic causes and biological processes—along with new translational medicine tools—gave us hope for a different future.

We saw an unprecedented opportunity for a serious, well-funded effort to discover and develop new, effective therapies to treat and cure Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, and other rare neurodegenerative diseases.

So we seeded a new company. Named after the highest mountain peak in the United States, Denali Therapeutics aspires to conquer a most challenging problem by adopting a rigorous approach to drug development, identifying the right patients, observing treatment efficacy at earlier stages, and conducting clinical trials geared towards patient success.

We partnered with other like-minded investors and, through our deep relationships in the field, were able to attract Ryan Watts as CEO, who in turn assembled a spectacular team. Denali Therapeutics has attracted some of the most talented scientific innovators in the world who bring extensive experience and an intense passion to develop therapies for these devastating diseases.

Since being founded in 2015, Denali Therapeutics has raised more than $300M privately and in December 2017 went public, breaking the 2017 record for initial market valuation of a biotech company.

“The team at F-Prime led the founding of Denali and helped create a company focused on solving big medical problems. They brought the scientific and business firepower to rapidly found and grow Denali.”

—Ryan Watts, CEO