Dutch venture builder NLC has announced a €20m first close for its new Health Impact Fund, from which it will invest in 40 startups, both new investments and follow-on. It’s targeting a final close of €100m later this year.

According to NLC, there’s a huge funding gap that prevents patents from becoming successful companies, with 95% of all healthtech inventions never reaching the market. In Europe alone, nearly 24,000 medical technology and biotechnology patent applications were filed with the European Patent Office in 2022. More than 40% of the patents filed with the office are from Europe.

NLC’s patent-hunting team works closely with universities and searches through medical journals. NLC works with more than 40 universities and research hospitals across Europe, including Amsterdam University, Berlin’s Charité Medical University Hospital and Oxford University, to help commercialise patents emerging from the institution’s researchers, either with the university or the scientist depending on the country.

NLC has an 80-strong team responsible for identifying patents at universities across Europe and then helping to co-found startups based on those patents. The team finds an external co-founder and backs the new companies with both capital and support, potentially for years, until they have a product ready for the market. They work across biotech, medtech, green health and digital health and have over 110 portfolio ventures built across 11 European countries and has around 80 companies still under the wings.

In spite of the headwinds the market is facing, the initial close of the NLC Health Impact Fund exceeded the fund management team’s expectations. Bert Arjan Millenaar, CEO and Founder of NLC, noted: “This proves that the right venture building model, together with NLC’s ecosystem of healthcare stakeholders, can make early-stage healthcare innovations investible again.”

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