The BioStrat Brief · Amandeep Singh, Ph.D. ·
How Platform Biotechs Can Win in an Asset-Obsessed Market? A Fundraising Playbook
Investors now ask platform founders for an asset first. How to engineer a venture-ready platform proof of concept and pitch it with the 60/40 framework.
Only a few years ago, a biotech or techbio platform founder with just a pitch deck detailing revolutionary technology with broad discovery potential could walk out with a $30M check. The promise of an ‘engine’ was enough to capture the future potential value.
Today the same thesis is met with a polite but an uncompromising question: “What disease indication are you going to solve first? Do you have an asset already?"
The biotech market has gone through cycles on the same ‘asset-versus-platform’ questions since the 2000s. Today, with the looming patent cliffs faced by big pharma and a gap to fill the sales-generating assets, the pendulum has swung back, with capital concentrating heavily on later-stage clinical assets that can fill the gap.
For today’s platform founders, this shift poses an existential dilemma: how do you secure funding to build your underlying technology when the market only wants to buy a specific molecule?
You are caught in a classic Catch-22. You need funding to build the platform that will generate the asset, but you need an asset to secure the funding. The escape hatch lies in strategically shaping your Platform Proof of Concept (PPOC).
Step-by-Step: Engineering an Investable POC
The most common mistake first-time founders of platform companies make in their early days is choosing a POC to satisfy their internal curiosity, often built on some experience in a disease area, or because a path of least resistance opened up, as an easy collaboration happened with a friend whose lab has some specific assays available.
Another frequent approach I see is pursuing a target with limited biological validation or unclear/complex biology, that many companies have failed to drug in the past, because they feel the platform could address the gap. Founders mistakenly believe the platform can magically fix bad biology. But look at it this way: if your program fails, you must know definitively that it was a flaw in your engineering, not a mystery in biology.
Both approaches, when not planned well, lead to similar dead ends. You either end up with a technically successful result that holds zero commercial value, or your limited capital runs out before you can unequivocally prove the result profile.
To bridge this gap, apply these six sharp strategic guardrails to build a venture-ready PPOC:
1. Dig beneath the surface to find the platform-indication fit
Once you have selected a handful of addressable targets with well-understood biology, go deep. Reach out to patient advocacy groups, track data from clinical forums, and consult specialized advisors to identify precise disease subtypes or small sub-populations where clear gaps exist. For example, if your platform’s edge is reducing toxicity by improving selectivity, ruthlessly target indications where toxicity caused a previous drug to fail. Create a quantitative scoring function that combines the magnitude of the unmet medical need with how uniquely positioned your platform is to address it.
2. Optimize for speed with market size in balance
You will likely identify several populations where your platform could shine. Build lean, "beta-version" market models analyzing the addressable population, market size, current Standard of Care (SOC), competing pipelines, and what an eventual Target Product Profile (TPP) must look like. Layer in the approximate cost of data and time-to-results to narrow your selection. Once decided, choose a set of experiments that unequivocally assign the positive results to your platform’s unique output, rather than baseline biology.
3. Prioritize resources for modality/outcome over insights
If your platform is discovery-based (selling data or insights), recognize that pharma historically pays pennies for raw information. Every single dollar of your initial capital must be optimized to increase the data output of your physical assets. Do not burn precious runway building "nice-to-have" infrastructure or software components of the platform until the core asset data validates the direction.
4. Generate diligence-ready and credible artifacts
Recruit academic advisors and professors who are highly specific to your chosen disease area first, rather than drug discovery generalists. Their specialized backing provides immediate external credibility to investors. Furthermore, your POC data cannot rely on you being in the room to explain away anomalies or gaps. The data must be structured, robust, and clean enough to survive intense, independent scrutiny.
5. Bake in harsh operational kill-switches in the development plan
True venture readiness means showing investors you possess the maturity to kill an underperforming asset early. When you present the development plan, you must have predefined, objective metrics that trigger an immediate pivot to other programs. This discipline builds immense trust with VCs, proving that you will treat their capital with operational rigor, rather than sinking millions into a pet scientific project.
6. Dictate the target list to partners
Many early-stage platforms pursue pharmaceutical partnerships prematurely to solve a lack of capital. When negotiating these early validation deals, do not blindly accept pharma’s internal "wish list." Those lists almost exclusively consist of volatile targets that have already defeated their internal teams. Instead, present a structured menu of target types that your technology is uniquely positioned to address.
The 60/40 Pitch Framework
Once the PPOC is built, the challenge shifts to communication. How do you pitch a lead asset to satisfy risk-averse investors without looking like a boring, single-asset biotech company?
The solution is the 60/40 rule of narrative structure.
When building your investor pitch deck, allocate roughly 60% of your time and slides to asset execution. Dwell heavily on your lead molecule’s pre-clinical data, its translational relevance, its safety signals, and its potential regulatory development path. This gives the asset-hungry investor exactly what they need to underwrite the risk.
Use the remaining 40% of your narrative to showcase platform scalability. Position your lead asset not as a one-off miracle, but as the first repeatable blueprint. Show how the underlying architecture of your platform makes generating Asset #2 and Asset #3 significantly faster, cheaper, and more likely to succeed.
About the author: Amandeep Singh, Ph.D. is the Founder of BioStrateon, a boutique corporate strategy and growth advisory firm for the life sciences sector. He leverages his deep domain expertise in drug discovery and dealmaking to help companies navigate capital markets, prioritize pipelines, and partner with big pharma.
First published in The BioStrat Brief on LinkedIn, 30 June 2026. Subscribe to The BioStrat Brief for a dealmaker's take on M&A, fundraising, strategy and markets in life sciences.