Ready, set, go! The fifth edition of biotope’s basecamp is in full swing

On Tuesday, we hosted Aurelie Nowack of V-Bio Ventures and Anouk Schoors of The Nest Family Office. Aurelie focused on venture capital and the biotech industry, and what VCs look for in biotech startups. Her expertise helped demystify the venture capital process for our founders. Anouk shared her extensive knowledge on family office investments, providing valuable insights into how startups can attract and work with family offices.

On Wednesday, we invited Maarten Vandecruys of Urban Crop Solutions, Ruben Tadmor of The Supplant Company, and Elsa Lauwers of Paleo to share their experience in scaling-up, as well as Tessa Dugardin of Stella P to talk about how to put together a great board. 

The founders in our new cohort also got to meet those who went before them: the teams of some of biotope’s portfolio companies, who were selected by the investment committee after one of the previous basecamp editions. Bernd Everaert of AmphiStar and Gilles De Clercq and Emile Redant of N-Fix shared their experiences and strategies for scaling a startup successfully. 

More workshops on Thursday with Ellen Crabbe of brantsandpatents. Ellen provided a comprehensive overview of the IP process and how startups can protect their innovations. Her expertise helped demystify the complex world of IP.

Steven Vandenabeele, CTO at Aphea.Bio, hosted a session that was both informative and inspiring for our agri-tech founders, and Mark Kahn of Omnivore shared his experiences and strategies for investing in agrifood startups in India and South East Asia. His session provided a global perspective on agrifood innovation.

We closed the day on Thursday with a networking event to put the startups in touch with even more people in the biotope community.

Last but not least: on Friday, we hosted a session on biotech valuation with Griet Vanpoucke, Head New Ventures at VIB. Biotope team member Peter Cauwels provided more details on the convertible loan agreement for biotope portfolio companies, and finally, VIB Business Development managers Tom Viaene, Michiel Bontinck, and Yadira Olvera had 1-on-1 sessions with participating startups to dive deeper into their business model canvas.

In other words, the first week has set a strong foundation, and we are eager to see the continued growth and development of our founders over the next two weeks!

A big thank you to all our partners who generously shared their knowledge and expertise, which is invaluable to all the startups in our new cohort.