Jessica Owens and Iana Dimkova, co-founders of Initiate Ventures, are launching their new healthcare/ life sciences-focused firm with a respectable $45 million debut fund.
One of the ways they convinced limited partners to become investors is because they are building a combination early-stage and incubation firm. So not only will they invest in early-stage startups at the intersection of tech and life sciences but they will also pursue incubating some startups companies in-house, aka finding founders to turn ideas into companies.
Incubation “is a model that’s worked really well for life sciences in the past,” Dimkova said, citing firms like Flagship Pioneering, which launched Moderna. “Their entire investment strategy is actually backed by incubations and following those companies as they scale.”
While some venture firms incubate tech startups, including health tech startups, Initiate’s focus on the health and life sciences area is what sets the firm apart, Dimkova said.
Initiate co-founders, who will split their time and efforts between their investing in existing seed and Series A companies – checks range from $500,000 to $3 million – and launching new companies through their venture studio. One of them will typically take the role of an interim CEO at inception.
They have the bona fides to tackle this kind of firm. Each of them has spent nearly two decades as entrepreneurs and investors in healthcare.
Prior to launching Initiate, Owens (pictured right above) co-founded Grail, an early cancer detection company that was acquired by Illumina in 2020 for $8 billion. She also held executive roles in several other startups and was a healthcare investor with Kleiner Perkins during the late 2000s.
Meanwhile, Dimkova (pictured left above) was an investor at GE Ventures, a corporate venture fund, which was one of the most active health technology investors in the 2000s and early last decade. Before that, she was an early team member at ProCure Treatment Center, a nationwide radiation therapy practice.
Initiate’s venture studio has already founded five startups, and four of these companies have already secured follow-on financing either from Initiate themselves or other VC firms. One such company includes Persana, an esthetic and plastic surgery concierge that provides advice and matches patients with top practitioners throughout the U.S.
The firm’s other investments include Macro Trials, a clinical trials platform that matches pharmaceutical companies with participants, especially people with diverse backgrounds; Cornerstone AI, a startup that uses AI to automate the cleaning of healthcare data in electronic health records, healthcare registries, claims, and clinical trials. Initiate also has several companies that are still in stealth, including a non-oncology-focused liquid biopsy startup.
