Forbion’s Slootweg on Europe’s funding environment

Slootweg also details Forbion’s meteoric rise to become the largest independent European VC, and hunting for new assets in Asia

The European biotech ecosystem has gone through a substantial maturation process over the past 20 years, as VC funds such as Forbion have experienced exponential growth to fund the region’s innovation. But Forbion co-founder and Managing Director Sander Slootweg says there’s still more that can be done to fund future European innovations and improve Europe’s competitiveness globally.

“We’ve observed in Europe that although we see great science, and we’ve been able to build great companies, in terms of the absolute magnitude of the ecosystem, we’re still lagging behind the U.S., and also China is coming up quickly,” Slootweg said. “One of the major structural impediments is the overall availability of capital to the VC ecosystem, and therefore indirectly to companies.” 

Slootweg also discussed Forbion’s growth over the past 10 years and where he sees its next leg of future development, in what he terms the bioeconomy: applying biotech technologies to parts of the economy beyond therapeutics, such as agriculture, food and environmental health.

He also shared his perspective on the NewCo Model of sourcing assets from Asia and how there’s a shift now toward earlier-stage programs, and what Europe needs to fix to become more competitive globally beyond strictly improving the financing environment.