UVC: Joseph Mocanu from Verge HealthTech Fund on interesting innovations in healthcare tech, 3 strategies that startups can use to ace fundraising and why it’s important for startups to do competitor analysis well

Understanding VC is a deep dive on how Venture Capitalists work. In this episode, I speak with Joseph Mocanu, founding partner of the Verge HealthTech Fund, a VC fund focusing on seed stage healthcare tech companies relevant to emerging markets. This conversation kicks off with Joseph talking about his reasons for building a VC fund specializing in healthcare. He then talks about the three areas of focus of the healthcare tech industry namely: prevention, diagnosis, and curing, and the interesting innovations happening in these respective areas. The conversation then navigates towards the three important strategies that founders should implement before they approach VCs for raising capital, namely: doing a thorough background check on the VC, being a little pessimistic or cautious rather than your normal state of optimism as an entrepreneur, and the art of telling great stories. Joseph then talks about the importance of ‘competitor analysis’ which eventually leads to him talking about the challenges that he faced while raising funds. Last but not the least, he talks about his interest in investing in healthcare startups which are focused on solving respiratory health problems. The podcast episode ends with us talking about the covid pandemic and the ways in which we can handle a pandemic better in the future.