Accelerating life science startups

On Thursday, I attended the Indie Bio SF Demo Day, a coming out party for 12 companies in its San Francisco accelerator.

SOSVentures, the sponsor of Indie Bio (which has a second site in Cork, Ireland) believes this is one of the first life science accelerators.

As with a life science incubator, the accelerator requires provide startups with shared wet lab space. However, following the accelerator model pioneered by Y Combinator, the accelerator provides mentorship with a fixed term of residency.

The 12 companies applied in January, joined in February and marked their coming out Thursday with a pitch and exhibition to the press and potential investors. The 12 companies are:

• ABioBot (Raghu Machiraju, CEO): lower cost, higher reliability lab automation
• Affinity Wulfrun (Anil Bagha, CEO): improved column for manufacturing monoclonal antibodies
• Arcturus BioCloud (Jamie Sotomayo, CEO): cloud hosted recombinant DNA experiments
• ArkReactor aka Sensa.io: inexpensive bioreactors
• BioLoom (Jennifer Kaehms, CEO): biomaterials for skin repair
• Blue Turtle Bio (Adham Aljahmi, CEO): oral administration of enzyme replacement therapy
• Clara Foods (Arturo Elizondo, CEO): synthetic egg whites
• Extem Bioscience (Mardonn Chua, CEO): high throughput stem cell production
• Orphidia (Aron Rachamim, CEO): point-of-care lab-quality assays from a single drop of blood
• Pembient (Matthew Markus, CEO): synthetic rhino horn to supplant poaching
• Ranomics (Cathy Tie, CEO): genomic database for oncology diagnostics
• ZymoChem (Harshal Chokhawala, CEO): higher yield synthetic petrochemicals

TechCrunch profiled 11 of the 12 companies in their report of the demo event, while three of the companies were profiled when Co.Exist toured the IndieBio lab in April.

Talking to the entrepreneurs, all were indoctrinated in the "lean startup" philosophy. At least one of the companies has already done a “pivot.”

Consistent with that, each of the firms was trying to get to market with the minimum possible cash. Several of the companies have revenues already, and at least two hope to be cash flow positive within the next year. Several of these are tools companies — a business model that is quick to cash flow positive — while the one therapeutics company is targeting orphan diseases which offer a quicker and less expensive regulatory pathway.