Founder's FAQ
We strive to be as transparent as we can with entrepreneurs.
Why not create a better process right from the get-go!
Raising capital is already hard…the least we could do is provide hard-working founders the answers to the most common questions they have.
We hope the following helps you determine if Wavemaker Three-Sixty Health is potentially a good fit for you. And we hope this F-FAQ becomes an industry standard used by other venture funds!
We start with a very expansive definition of what it means to be a healthcare company and then we subtract bio-pharma (drug discovery) as the only sector of healthcare we don’t focus on. We boil this down to health-tech, digital health, medical devices, pharma-tech, telehealth, healthcare marketplaces and science companies. We also focus on companies that sell into all different parts of the continuum of care. We care a lot about value based health and precision healthcare too!
Our investments are almost always into Seed stage rounds. Occasionally we will do pre-Seed and smaller Series A. We love when companies have revenue (naturally), but we are comfortable investing pre-commercial revenue (and do so about half the time). When we invest pre-revenue, we expect the company to be generating commercial revenue within 6-12 months. We typically invest into $2MM - $8MM financings, with the expectation that other venture funds are participating.
We have a 2-check strategy. We generally write a $500K-$2MM first checks, and reserve up to 2X-4X that amount for follow-on investments into our best performing companies when they get to the Series A/B.
Home is Pasadena, however we have team members in NYC (including an office), Florida, Virginia Beach, and have a "sister fund" in Singapore.
We consider ourselves very knowledgeable about the US healthcare system, and therefore concentrate on the US. It’s hard to be good at healthcare investing if you don’t have a strong understanding of the country’s healthcare system. We also look at our neighbor Canada, Western Europe and Asia (we have a “sister fund” headquartered in Singapore), provided those startups have near-term plans to expand into the US.
We are launching our third fund in 2024, and that brings our AUM to about $200MM. The aggregate value of our portfolio of early stage health-tech companies exceeds $2.5BB.
Our favorite question. What really differentiates us is the fact that the majority of our investors are people and companies in the healthcare industry. We take advantage of this to the benefit of our portfolio companies by selectively introducing them to our LPs to help with their go-to-market strategies. Oh, and we have about 300+ LPs, so lots to choose from!
Three-Sixty Advisory Group is a boutique healthcare consultancy that effectively founded Wavemaker Three-Sixty in 2017. While there is some occasional synergy between the consultancy and the fund, the two companies run autonomously.
Yep…that’s our thing. We have 200+ Limited Partners (investors) that are captains of industry of the US healthcare system, plus formal and informal relationships with many healthcare institutions around the US, including hospitals, health systems, academic medical centers, medical schools, post-acute (SNFs and home health), urgent care and more. Healthcare is a “hard” industry for entrepreneurs to get a foot in the door. We are here to help, thanks to our partnerships…we are much more than a checkbook.
Every 2-3 months we invite the top 3-4 companies we are tracking to meet with a large audience (25-50) comprised of fund advisors, healthcare executives, other venture funds we like to co-invest with, and more. The idea is to a have a long-form discussion with this group, and do a deep dive on your company (we aren’t big fans of the “quick-pitch” format).
We lead, co-lead and don’t lead.
No. But when it makes sense, we’ll negotiate a Board seat, sometimes given to a member of the core partner team and sometimes given to a value-add Limited Partner of the fund.
We have few hard and fast rules, but this is one. We always co-invest with other funds, hospitals, corporates and occasionally angel groups. We want our companies to have more capital and we believe other investors bring something to the table too.
The biggest reason is that it doesn’t leverage our super power…we have amazing investors that are able and willing to help our early stage healthcare companies commercialize. Their talents are wasted on business models that endure long clinical trials.
Priced rounds, SAFEs and Convertible Notes.
We thought LA needed a venture fund that was 100% dedicated to healthcare, at the Seed stage. And so did nearly 300 investors across our first and second fund. So we made it happen. Today we invest with "profit and purpose" in mind, approximately 25% in Southern California, 25% in Northern California and 50% in the rest of the US and world.
