E386 | Stanislav Poslavsky (MiLaboratories) & Joachim Laqueur (Acrobator Ventures): The Founder–Investor Dynamic: Building MiLaboratories with Acrobator & KFund

0:00Welcome to the special EUVC podcast episode where we're interviewing Stan from me laboratories together with two of the investors in his cap table. Joachim from Acrobatter, Seed Stage Investor, and Miguel from KFund, Series A Stage Investor. We're going to talk a lot about the dynamics around investing, building conviction, but also look at some kind of funny picture moments and exploring the future of the company, Mii Laboratories. This is a new format, guys and girls, so if you are listening in and you have any feedback, please drop us a comment on you.vc or through uh spotify and other platforms you know tell us if you like it tell us what you love about it uh if you think we should deep dive deeper in specific topics such as deal making dynamics or company building dynamics or anything that comes to mind do give us that feedback so we can make more of these episodes make them more insightful for you and at the end of the day that's why we're here we want to you know add value to you European tech investor.

1:04Enjoy.

1:22This show is not investment advice and the hosts of this episode may be invested in the funds and companies featured. So today we have a special episode. With us we have Stan from Me Laboratories and we're going to do like a really kind of different episode to our loyal listeners. We're going to really focus on the story of this company from inception to where it is today. And it is at a quite exciting state, at least in my opinion. So quick intro, Stan. Stan is the CEO and co-founder of Mii Laboratories, a B2B biotech company focused on servicing bioinformaticians and biologists working in genomic research, particularly in academic and pharmaceutical settings.

2:03The company was founded in 2021, it's HQ'd in the US, 20 employees, and has raised roughly 9 million euros so far. Stan, welcome to the pod. Anything you want to add or a quick kind of elevator pitch like one-liner on new laboratories well you did uh you did great thank you very much for inviting uh everything is correct i think today we have more than 20 in place and yeah well although our headquarter is in the us here we are on the european uh we see podcasts because the majority of our human power actually located in spain and our r d center and developers located in spain in the city of bilbao where i'm right now awesome the beautiful city of Bilbao.

2:47And we also have with us a repeat offender of the EUVC podcast and a good friend, Joachim from Acrobatter. And so for those that haven't tuned into those episodes, Joachim is the founding partner of Acrobatter Ventures, 25 million euro fund HQ in the Netherlands, focused on the seed stage. They are global, but they have a focus on Europe and the US, and they're backing B2B software and software-enabled hardware companies. Some of Joachim's notable investments are Lemonade Health, Vital Field, StepShot, Archimoto, Ready Player Me, a very well-known company, Tango, Color, Promo Republic, EZDMark, Me Laboratories, the company we're talking about today, Barnally, and StepShot.

3:31Joachim, anything you want to add and welcome to the show. Yeah, no, that's pretty accurate. The fund Acrobata is indeed about 25 million. We're right at the end of it. So we're starting a new chapter soon with our new brand name, 432 Legacy. That could be an episode in itself, right? Maybe we'll do that and talk a bit about the rebranding and the journey from fund one to fund two. But let's start off with how did you two beautiful gentlemen meet? Stan, do you want to kind of share kind of what was it like the early days of the fundraising process with Mii Laboratories and how the hell did you come across this kind of guy based in the Netherlands doing investments in a space that had an overlap with you?

4:20what you're doing so we we founded the company in 2021 and in summer i think we were able to raise some precede friends and family money yeah just to make sure not because we actually needed the money to be honest but because we wanted like to to understand whether we can do the fundraising yeah and and and try to pitch i'm a guy with a super deep technical background i have phd in theoretical physics many years i was working in in quantum field theory then i switched to computational biology so uh and then was doing research and my the kind of research i was doing all my life is a like theoretical physics is something where you're sitting down alone for many many hours and writing on the papers you know not speaking much with people so uh we we definitely needed this training just to speak with people and try to pitch your company what You're doing it.

5:18And then we started our active seed fundraising process, trying to reach as many VCs as possible. Just everyone we could reach, we tried to reach and speak. We participated. That time, it was a COVID era still. And it was quite good for us because with Zoom meetings, you can reach more people. It's easier to jump on a call rather than to meet in person. So I think I did like around 70 pitches for different VCs and no success for those. The good conversations we had were with the funds, which we had direct interest. And Accrobator was one of such funds. So it's just because of our closest network.

6:06So we had friends who made an intro. And then we met on a call. I did my 50s 60s pitch and it went well although I remember that it was early in the morning and for me it's not the time when I can do well not the most productive time Joachim same question other side of the table yeah other side of the tables yeah we were at the time in touch with Mubadala sovereign wealth fund in the Emirates and it's actually their associate who went to school with Alexei, if I'm correct to say this, who said, hey, you know, you should talk to my friend Alexei and Stan, they're doing something cool. I think the thing that struck us, it's not so much that I understand or could understand what they were doing, is that fortunately we had also Ramon on our team, so understanding the technical side of what they were doing was, you know, quite capable at.

7:04But the fact that we were talking to this team that just, you know, from a research project turned into some kind of almost open source kind of command line software being used, all kinds of academic clusters in the world. And all of a sudden found them at the cross section of COVID and big pharma needing to run tons and tons of leads for their vaccines was extremely compelling. and especially their, which continues to display their stance on keeping the product completely free for the largest parts of their users, which is the academic world. And then we have a third member to our, a fourth counting myself, a fourth member to our little party here, which is Miguel Arias.

7:54Miguel is a GP at KFund, specifically Leadwind Ventures. So this is K Fund's early growth fund, 225 million or so. AUM of the firm, 650 million. HQ'd in Spain. The firm invests from pre-seed to Series B. So that's a big range. But Leadwind specifically, which is also kind of the focus we have today, has focused on Series A, Series B. So up to up to 10 million or so, I would say. Right. Target Geo, Southern Europe, Latam and focus is enabling tech technology so AI as a platform data as a platform IoT as a platform etc etc and then as a firm some of the notable investments Factorial, Exotica, Urbanitai, Barkibu, Abacum, TLDV extremely well known as well and then as an early early growth fund Kibim, Safia Salud, Mi Laboratories so who we're talking about today and VoiceMod.

8:51Miguel welcome to the pod. Anything you'd like to add in your intro? Hello, it's great to be here with all of you folks. Maybe it's good pointing out that before I became a venture capitalist, I was also an entrepreneur for many years and I was actually building a company in the data analytics space called Carto. So when I heard about my labs, in a way, it was close to my heart. Let's deep dive into that. So we just heard a tiny bit about how Joachim and Stan met. What What about yourself? How did you come to meet Stan and the Miller Boratis team? Yeah, I remember about that. I mean, we had a new member in our investment team, Nadeela Vardana.

9:32She came from Speed Invest, right? And she was, of course, well connected to all the team at Speed Invest and all the companies of the portfolio. So thanks to Andrea, the partner at Speed Invest, we got the news of this great company of a bunch of very talented Russians out of Bilbao. it's like what are those guys doing in Bilbao? We wanted to learn more first from the geo perspective that was interesting to us, but then of course around data, they were building a data platform for biologists, right? So there was also a closed-over thesis around enabling technologies, so we definitely had to meet them.

10:08Stan, what about a couple months after meeting Joachim and the team there and that round coming to be, then you had your Series A, right? Which was quite recently can you remind me of the timing of it so we closed it this summer actually yeah yeah so very very recently can you share a bit about that fundraising process and how was that different from you know what you just shared of your bunch of cold calls during covet time and realizing cold outreach does not work yeah well actually uh well almost same process just pictures pictures pictures i'm trying to reach as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time that's the key.

10:48The great thing in Series A fundraising was that we already had investors, Speed Invest and Acrobator, and they did the intros. And, well, as Miguel pointed out, though, we met with Key Fund because of Speed Invest, for example. So, and that's actually one of the greatest things coming from the VCs during the fundraising. They can introduce you, and then you will speak, and the other VC will listen, at least, you know? and then be interested and you can get introductions at a bit higher level etc etc so in that sense it was easier to reach and speak with the funds and talking about the key fund so for us well that was a great advantage that key fund is actually located here in spain yeah and uh we can just meet in person you know that's a big difference and that's one of the big things i learned during the course of of the business so meeting in person and seeing people So that's very important to understand what other people, what they're doing and what they want, what they can, what they can do, etc.

11:53It's super important. Joachim, question for you. For the investors listening in, and obviously there's a lot of early stage investors in Europe. So as such, we have a lot of early stage investors listening in. We just heard that intros from the cap table were really helpful from your laboratories, right? any best practices you'd say for other early stage investors like yourself in the process of doing that you know because on the receiving end you know you always receive a lot of recommendations from a bunch of people and like everything in life 80 isn't that good 20 is interesting and then what one percent is actually something you act on right and so what what kind of learnings do you have or examples of stuff you guys did right in the story of me laboratories that you'd you'd share with others we try to do what we ask of other people or industrial vcs or or angels introducing deals to us is to motivate what why we're interested in this company why are we bullish about their the company the fee future um because if you don't articulate that then it just becomes a little bit too easy because you're just throwing things over the fence and actually one of the biggest like biases and fallacies of this industry is that well if miguel you know sends me something already there's already like a bias going like oh it's Miguel that sent it so therefore I'm going to pay more attention it helps so you have to use it but it's also you know a danger I would say so that's my single thing is just really motivate with clear reasons why you're bullish about a company and a team.

13:29Can I interject? Yeah I was going to ask you to comment Yes, please do, please do. Because I was thinking about the other way, right? I mean, we get all those intros and we always ask yourselves, why us? Why are we getting this intro, right? I mean, is it that the fund, of course, and with Jochen, we already have trust, but in many cases we receive intros from funds we don't know them so well, right? So why are we getting this? Is it that we are the 90th fund that is getting this? So after 89 rejections, is it us now? So it's important to us to understand that there is a thought process happening before that the intro coming to us is there because they look at the real value.

14:11Like, hey, maybe in this case, we thought, of course, when I grow the company in Spain, they will need to have interest to hiding talent and we can help with that. If they are building a data platform, then they will probably like to also work with people that also come from the open source space and the data platform. So this is our rationality to make sure that we don't feel we are the last one in the disco, right? So at least that there is a reason for the other fans to talk to us. No, no. And the why us is such an important question, right? So I think, you know, just to summarize that. So from the sharing side, why are we excited?

14:46I guess, Joachim, the fact that your fund has a strategy that allows you to double down also allows you to kind of showcase that, you know, kind of. because you can actually show that you believe in this company not only through words. So that's helpful. Then on the receiving side, you know, why the hell am I getting this? Am I included in a mailing list with 200 VCs or was this actually shared to me by an email written by Joachim specifically for me, right? At least make it look like that, right? At least make it look... Yeah, or at least, you know, WhatsApp has the beauty that it's very likely that when you get a WhatsApp message, it's meant for you, right?

15:23Stan, I want to go back to something you said around your journey as a founder fundraising. So you said something that we all kind of laughed and kind of smiled about, which was, you know, given your background, you know, that first kind of angel money that you got in was a good experience to start talking with people, right? Actually, to add to that, your business is also quite complex. most people don't understand it within, I don't know, a 10 minute pitch. They need a lot of follow-up questions. So I'd love to ask you kind of a two-pronged question here. Like as you reflect back on the seed fundraise and the Series A fundraise, like what are kind of some of your learnings?

16:06What were some of your challenges, both given your professional background, so more technical background, let's put it like that, but also a very technical business. So that's because, and I'm asking this because, you know, we love deep tech. We love supporting deep tech and we have a lot of awesome deep tech happening in Europe. But, you know, sometimes founders do struggle. Some struggles that you might have felt and might have overcome. I'd love to hear you out. Well, specifically, there were, I think, two key things. One thing is just my personal, well, not only mine, but the whole team. Due to our background, we are always underselling, you know.

16:43so when I compare when I see pictures from some US startups from I don't know YC I see like huge oversell and we were the opposite so always when we were preparing the first version of our pitch deck for the seed round and we put like the labels of our customers on the slide our key big pharma customers our chief science officer said we can't do this never, never, no, no, no they did not allow us to put this here on the slide you know uh well if not then what to show yeah and we had to overcome this and i think we we succeeded so we we we can show we can show something and now i i think i can sell also for investors and for for the customers and that i had to learn and the second thing is actually speaking about complicated things in simple words so I thought all my life I thought that this is my strong side actually because I was here in the university I was teaching students very complicated mathematics very advanced physics etc and I always was able to find like simple words for very complicated things but I need time for this so I never tried to do this in like five minutes ten minutes sometimes you have a pitch for 15 minutes or well sometimes it's five minutes I had this and how to explain this very very complicated complex let's say complex problem in five minutes so I struggled with this and still I don't think that we are like super good at this so still a lot of room for improvements reflecting how we did I understand that this is very important this is very important to let's say ensure that the opposite side at least understand the stance that there is a problem in the industry, maybe not in the very deep details, but it is that there is a demand.

18:44You need to show this. And second, you need to show that you have something, really bulletproof that you have something. You have an expertise and something to solve this problem. Are you more comfortable now with taking liberties with the technical correctness of the description of what you do? because I think that's a fallacy or difficulty for very technical products and technical founders that they want to be very correct in how they describe something and not just sometimes you just have to go like okay let's dumb it down even shorter we're doing this for that and I know it's not completely correct but at least you get it yeah that's true now I can do this it's not only for VCs that's for customers as well so you know There are a lot of funny images.

19:32You build a great product, and this is how the customer use it. VCs are low in that trophic pyramid, right? We add the numbers, and then the customers. Exactly.

19:45Similar with tech literacy as well, funnily enough. Stan, on that note, for those listening who want to learn more about me laboratories, give us a quick understanding of what is the company, what does it do, dumb it down please yeah well so uh how much time we have

20:10something like that something like that we're flexible so uh we are a software company and we are building a software platform for computational biology the modern medicine is actually based on the data genomics data primarily the data generated the dna data rna data and all of the modern let's say vaccines like the cancer vaccines uh modern immune therapies and other stuff car t etc all those novel approaches in medicine are based on the data and this data is tremendous like terabytes petabytes of data generated for single experiment yeah for single clinical trial and companies understand what's going on with with the health system, how the disease behaves, and et cetera, based on the data, out of the data.

21:00Yeah, so you need to process the data. So you cannot, like, look on the terabyte of data with your eyes and understand what's going on. So you need the software. The software is quite complicated. The algorithms and mathematics behind the scenes is really complex. And we build a software platform which enables people who are conducting those therapy developments and drug development to process that data and understand what's going on there easily. That's a key thing because normally the process of therapy development is done by biologists, clinicians, people who are not like experts in computational science.

21:39And at the same time, the algorithms allowing people to understand what's going on, to process the data, like those mathematical algorithms, yeah? Like AI, machine learning, they are developed by bioinformaticians or computational biologists, people who are, let's say, in this direction like mathematicians and developing tools. But applying these tools to that amount of data of absolutely different types, different modalities, is not an easy task itself. Because imagine a doctor in clinic who is, well, let's say, doing a real cancer therapy, will run some common-line tools on Linux with terabytes of data.

22:17That's impossible. The doctor who is managing the cancer therapy should be able to do this easily. So that's where our platform comes in. It allows bioinformaticians to build applications out of their mathematical, let's put it this way, mathematical algorithms and deliver them to real end users who are biologists and clinicians doing the real research. It's in a way, and now I'm going to do stuff that you'll probably hate me for. But anyway, it's like you develop like a low-code option for coders building apps to sell to enterprise clients in a way. Yeah, yeah, that's true. But a good analogy will be here with Windows.

23:00So Windows is a low-code platform for people to do stuff. So that's the same with our software. It's like Windows, you know, it's like a operating system. Low-code platform, but low-code can be of different, let's say, types. in our case it's low code with a lot of possibilities you know not just low code sums I love it that I mean bringing it really dumb is like it is like Windows you know for your grandma it's like Windows that's it just judging by the lines number of lines of code that we have in our software already it's way more than in Windows 95 everyone loves the scale of windows it's a good it's a good comparable yeah and uh to add here actually uh one important thing which i guess super important is that uh we have we have big pharma customers who are using it for some really breakthrough stuff like cancer vaccines covid vaccines car t serapis and and other things and to use it like in a real real environment so So the context being, you know, just to, you know, make sure everyone gets it, you know, to develop new, new solutions and new, new drugs, new vaccines, new, you know, therapies for diseases.

24:23Nowadays, we need to be able to process way more data and you guys are just enabling that through platform. Exactly. Software that helps those that need to do that. Exactly, and having it done by the actual people doing the research, not needing another layer of mathematicians in between to process, it just speeds up the entire chain. Yeah, it speeds up dramatically. So just one example, this month's example, we were able, with one of our Big Pharma customers, they were able to do the sync, which they previously did in antibody discovery during, well, two, three months, like the time needed for, people for the team to get the result within just two days.

25:07Well, that's a big difference because, well, the time is money. Multiply that by all of the new vaccines being discovered or tested, you get enormous, enormous amounts of time saving. How did you react? How did you feel when you first heard about me laboratories? You know, reminiscing back to that first time you met and also kind of, were there any kind of potential red flags that you saw at the time that made you kind of worry maybe it's important for the owners to understand sort of our fund primarily invests in what we call you know slavic founders so when it comes to a little bit rough around the edges or english not being perfect that's no way a problem for us it's the other way around that we get like a really smoke-stalking american who go like that's not for us you know i'd be just good but So that was never an issue.

26:03I think the one thing we're very aware of, and it's still something the company develops, is it's a very technical product. It's a very technical team. So moving into a company with good sales operations, that is still something to be built. I mean, frankly, it's still a very young company. We're only talking 20 people. what is a testament to their ingenuity grid is that they basically ran this company profitable from day one which is insane in Deep Tech especially. So I think that's very impressive, very methodical, very open to learn. Not easy sometimes to convince about a thing there's always a thought process behind it but I think that's strong.

26:54I think B, that was the orange flag, right? That's the thing that we are fully aware of. How we sort of balance that is that this company has a complete unfair advantage compared to anyone else wanting to enter this. A, they started a lot earlier, but B, their tool at the time, and as Stan said, is command line, right? Not even the user interface at the time, was already being used by all kinds of academic researchers or bioinformaticians all over the world. So you have, it's like the world's already using it. It's just, we just need to start converting them. And as these people go from academics into commercial, they'll still want to use the tools that used to use.

27:34So that sort of has alleviated the pressure of, oh, this team needs to have, you know, a salesperson today. There is, there's this unfair situation that they could, so that was it. I think what I always loved And Miguel had a picture of that, like the initial team picture in the deck. To me, especially Stan, I'm sorry to say that it was like Dexter's laboratory. It was so funny. To be fair, I think it was a Sue Landers blue steel. Right?

28:11Both Stan and Alexei are really killing it, right, in a way. So it's, I don't know. We were a bit concerned that if they thought that was the best picture they had of themselves, I don't know how... What was the thought process there? They were not allowed to smile. That was the thought process. No, exactly. Don't smile. Look smart. Look serious.

28:35So, go ahead, Stan. Please, please. You don't have to. I knew what I had in my mind always is the thought of, let's say, famous physicists of the past. way back in the past 18th century I love that that was the benchmark now things make sense David it's funny we told them hey please for the announcement could you please do a different picture and then they did one and really more startupy so if you could pull that one up so we're like oh finally finally, finally, okay, smiles. But you can see that Dmitry is wearing the airports, which is insane. Why would he do that in the picture? That's probably generational because I find myself doing that a bit way too much.

29:37But I think we all agree that this looks way too much. Yeah, this is fundable. This is a very fundable company. Miguel, what about, aside from, you know, So pictures aside and jokes aside, of course, it does play a role. Of course it does, right? First impressions when you first met the company. By the way, so Series A was closed during the summer. How long was that process? When did you meet the team? When did you start kind of diving into it? Well, it was a quite fast process, no more than one month and a half, two months max, right? From the first initial intro from Speed Invest to meeting the team in Bilbao to then doing the whole process and then expedited diligence.

30:17So around two months max, all in all, right, the whole process. And from us, our side as a fan, we were getting more and more familiar with health tech and with biotech, which was not so much our turf a while ago. So we had some companies like IMU, IMOU being there in this space, Kivim, so both around precision medicine, using more data at scale. So that was in a way, and we were talking more to pharma too, right? So that was happening in our head. And we had also looked a lot around Sekera, which is in a way also in the same space. So we had some initial understanding, at least basic understanding on what they were doing, which was critical.

30:57If not just from zero to 100, it's very hard to do that. And then when you were talking before about the product and how Stan was picturing it, it's always important that you try to make the knowledge from your own experience and what excites you most as an investor to get conviction. And this idea of bridging this gap between two different worlds, the bioinformaticians and the biologists, was in a way very close to our own thoughts as we were building Carto around closing the bridge between GIS specialists and business users, right? So then we could somehow start to put each of the pieces in the same analogy.