BrainTech Alliance in San Carlos - François Véron, Newfund HEKA

François Véron: bringing European brain science into the American healthcare system

At the BrainTech Alliance gathering in San Carlos, scientists, founders, investors, and healthcare innovators came together to discuss the future of BrainTech and the conditions needed to bring new solutions to patients faster.

Among the participants was François Véron, Managing Partner at Newfund HEKA, dedicated to BrainTech. Through HEKA, Newfund backs startups working at the intersection of neuroscience, digital health, AI, and medical technologies, with a strong focus on helping European science scale into the US healthcare market.

For François Véron, investing in BrainTech requires two essential pillars: scientific depth and market clarity.

“There are two pillars for us that are absolutely required. The first one is serious science. I'm not saying it has to be 100% validated. These things take time and science is about doubt. So before a breakthrough is completely accepted and proven, it takes a lot of time.

But what we want at Newfund Heka is that the scientific bedrock, the principles on which the startup is building its solution, has already received some sort, some kind of scientific validation. That's the first pillar. The second pillar is clarity.

On, the go to market, it's not sufficient to say that you have a solution that is beneficial for the patient. You have to understand how is it is going to be absorbed, how it's going to be implemented into the healthcare system.

Our goal at Newfund is to bring European science into the American healthcare system. We have great founders in Europe, great science, but the reimbursement process, the certification process and the reimbursement process are so long that we are losing the sense of urgency that is absolutely required in this matter.

What we want with the BrainTech Alliance is getting solutions for people fighting brain diseases faster.

AI, is ready to change mental health and neurotech, but it's running on empty. We definitely need the data sets and we need the massive and standardized so that AI can actually work for the patient.

That's going to be the topic of the next BrainTech Alliance event in Paris. We're going to fuse the agility of the Valley with the clinical scale of major European institutions. We're hosted by the Brain Institute, one of the driving forces in Europe for building and sharing massive patient cohorts on the scale of the UK Biobank.”

Through the BrainTech Alliance, Newfund HEKA aims to help structure a global ecosystem capable of turning scientific advances into concrete patient impact.

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