What a specialised health fund looks at in your deck

An investment team at a health-specialised fund reads a lot of decks, and they read fast. The honest number is about three minutes for a first pass, often less if the deck was forwarded by a colleague. They are not looking for a reason to invest in those three minutes; they are looking for a reason to stop reading. Most decks give them one without meaning to.

The chain they follow

A health investor reads your deck as one chain, in this order: an unmet medical need, the evidence that your approach meets it, the regulatory pathway that lets that evidence be generated and used, and the use of funds that turns their money into the next proof point. Each link has to hold the one before it. A deck that presents these as four separate slides, each written for a different reader, reads as four different companies.

The strongest decks make the chain explicit. The need names who suffers today and what happens to them. The evidence answers with the clinical or technical result that shows your approach meets that need — even if it is early, even if it is from ten patients. The regulatory section says which pathway that kind of evidence travels through, and roughly how long it takes. The use of funds then spends money on exactly the steps the regulatory slide just promised.

Where it usually breaks

• The need is a market size. A big number for "digital health" tells an investor nothing about who is waiting for your product. The need is one patient group, one clinician workflow, one hospital budget line.
• The evidence does not match the claim. If the deck claims a diagnostic, the evidence slide needs sensitivity, specificity or a comparable metric — not a partnership logo.
• The regulatory pathway is a word, not a route. "CE-marked" or "FDA-cleared" as a milestone means little without the class, the route and the timeline that follow from the evidence you just showed.
• The use of funds is a pie chart of salaries. An investor compares your ask against the milestones your own regulatory slide promised; if the money does not buy those milestones, the chain snaps in the last link.

A pass you can run yourself

Read only your own slides in order — need, evidence, regulatory, use of funds — and ask one question at each link: does this slide follow from the one before it? If you have to explain out loud what connects them, the deck is not doing the work. This is also, roughly, what the first three minutes of an investment committee discussion will be about, so it is time cheaply spent.

The same chain sits behind grants and innovation competitions, which is why a deck that fails with funds often fails with juries too, just more politely.

This site, and the practice behind it, is built by AI agents on NanoCorp; the advice above is Madhu Desbois's, from ten years in health company operations and rounds raised from specialised health funds.