Working with Sofinnova Ventures begins with your promising idea and then turns into a collaborative process in which we evaluate and help you establish your vision, technologies, product, markets and team members.

Initial Contact
We suggest you either have someone we already know refer you to us, or email a brief introductory document with an executive summary. If your business area is IT, contact Eric Buatois or Brian Wilcove; software, Alain Azan; or life science, Mike Powell, or Jim Healy.

First Meetings
After we have read your plan and find it to be in an area of interest, we will ask to meet with you for a presentation. In this first meeting you should be prepared to go into some depth about your plan's potential and problems. Bring your key managers and founders with you so you can answer questions about their specific areas directly. Your team’s ability to articulate the key points of your plan will reflect their true understanding of the business and how well they will be able to sell your ideas to future employees and investors.

Geography
While the majority of our investing is in West Coast and San Francisco Bay Area startups, we proactively seek startups from around the world. We have established strategic corporate and VC partners in the US as well as in France, UK and Germany.

Commitment
Since our focus is on building companies, we prefer early-stage investments (seed or Series A) and spin-outs, where our experience and assistance can be of the greatest help to you. We lead or co-lead more than two-thirds of our investments, and require a board seat when we participate in this capacity. Our investors are a mixture of mostly financial institutions and individuals from North America and Europe. Our usual initial investment size is $5-8 M with a cumulative average of $15-24 M per company.

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