Founders

1. Early or growth-stage 
2. Industry agnostic but principal focus on medical device and health tech companies
3. Key strategic or lead investor
4. Positive data and traction
5. A coachable founder or strong team

Our partner funds establish their own investment criteria and diligence processes.  Please visit their homepages to learn more.

Generally, the entire process takes 4 to 6 weeks from application to investment decision.  

1. Written application: You will need to fill out a written questionnaire, submit a pitch deck, and upload supporting documents.  This process takes about 10 minutes.  We’ll look at the materials and determine whether your business fits our basic investment criteria and ensure that it’s not directly competitive with any of our existing investments.
2. Pitch Presentation: If you’ve made it past our initial screen, we’ll schedule a call with members of our team. This is an opportunity for you to share the specifics of your business.
3. Follow-up: We may ask for additional information or schedule follow-up calls.  This ensures that all questions are addressed and gives us the ability to probe more deeply.
4. Due Diligence: If you proceed to due diligence, we will ask you to submit additional documents and ask to speak with certain key stakeholders to help us complete our more thorough due diligence.

Investment: If you proceed, we will seek to reach acceptable investment terms and conditions with you unless you have a key strategic or lead investor that has already done so.

Typically, our investments range from $250,000 to $2.5 million, with average check sizes in the $500,000 range.  We also strive to support our portfolio companies with follow-on investments.

We will invest in pre-seed, seed, Series A and Series B companies.  We typically follow a key strategic or lead investor.

• If we are participating in a current investment round with qualified strategic or lead investor, we typically sign the paperwork you already have in place, sometimes with a management or information rights side letter.  
• If you do not have a key lead, we will seek to negotiate an agreeable valuation with you.  We typically invest through convertible notes with management or information rights side letters, or Series Seed Preferred or NVCA documents (see www.nvca.org). 

No, as it slows down the investment process and we see many applicants every year in the same or similar industries. We do not complete diligence or invest in companies that are directly competitive with our existing portfolio.  

1. All investments are through a special purpose vehicle (an LLC) that is specifically formed to aggregate investments from investors into your company, a common structure in early-stage investing. This keeps your ownership table clean and reduces your investor relations burden.
2. We must be able to share your approved pitch deck and certain additional information about your business with potential investors.
3. There must be sufficient investment interest from investors to close the financing—typically 15 investors—and all investors in your financing will be “accredited investors.”

• No, but it does help if you have a connection to one of our partners or a member of our investment team.

• Please email portal@variaventures.com and a member of our team will reach out to you to discuss.