How a Healthcare Founder Used Metal to Raise Their Seed
€12M
Total raised
Delmic builds advanced microscopy tools that help researchers capture nanoscale insights faster and with greater precision.
Problem Statement
As the Founder/CEO of Delmic, Sander wasn’t interested in finding general investors with some generalist experience in healthcare. Instead, he wanted to focus his time on investors that had the right sort of background and expertise to understand Delmic’s specialized microscopy and instrumentation thesis.
Without access to the right type of structured intelligence, Sander was constantly being routed to investors that had done some deals in healthcare in the recent past. These were still too broad and general in nature, making it hard for Sander to zoom in on the right type of investors.
Introducing the Investor Memory Layer
With Metal’s investor memory layer, Sander was immediately pushed into a universe of investors that had prior experience specifically with microscopy and instrumentation. In addition, he was able to filter for firms that had allocated X%+ of their investments in healthcare, and were specialists within the broader sector.
At a tactical level, Sander uses the “Company Search” function within Metal to specifically identify companies that had a similar or adjacent thesis, and then was able to identify investors behind such companies.
Finally, the end-to-end process for surfacing the most likely investors was fully automated, and with ranks such as “Top 5%” or “Top 25%”, Sander could see not only the fit assessment but also the rationale driving that judgment.
Outcome
With the above approach, Sander was able to rely on Metal’s judgment layer to surface the most likely investors. He did not always agree with the judgment, but found it as a particularly powerful mechanism to carve out the right universe of investors to evaluate and pursue.
Within 3-6 months of starting the raise, Sander ended up closing $5m+ in funding. Metal was a key part of the enablement layer that helped him run an efficient and targeted process.
“Prior to Metal, we relied on word of mouth to identify investors that had deep familiarity with and expertise in our sector, life sciences. With Metal, we are now able to take a more systematic approach toward identifying the right specialist firms.”
— Sander den Hoedt
Founder & CEO, Delmic
