E552 | EUVC Summit 2025 | Nirmesh Patel, Amino Collective: Future of Medicine: How VC is Driving Healthcare Innovation

0:00The future of medicine isn't pharma as usual. It's not just about better drugs. It's about rebuilding the system from the ground up. Enter Nirmish Patel of Amino Collective, a VC firm at the edge of where biology meets computation. I did a bunch of different things to figure that out. And long story short, I'm away into the world of venture where for the past three years I've been running deep tech investing at a New York-based venture firm. He's not backing the next pill. He's backing platforms. AI first, precision driven, and patient centered. At Amino, they invest in digital infrastructure that makes clinical trials faster, cheaper, and smarter.

0:39AI tools that compress drug discovery timelines. And biotech meets software hybrids that push the boundaries of personalized care. This is the new healthcare stack. Tech-led, lean, scalable. Because the real breakthrough isn't in the lab. It's how we build, fund, and scale science. Venture capital is no longer just the fuel. It's now part of the formula. I'm going to talk to you about, very quickly, about the future of medicine and why I believe it's European. So a quick hands up from everyone who's using AI in their daily life. I'll be very surprised if most of them isn't. Keep your hands there if the main model or the app that you use is European in nature.

1:28Wow, zero. I wasn't expecting that. Okay, well, what if I told you, if I asked that same question in bio-research labs all across the world, that the majority of people would be keeping their hands up? Well, they would, and that's thanks to these guys. In particular, Demis Sabis and John Jumper. They won the Nobel Prize last year for their alpha-fold model that they've developed at DeepMind. That's a protein folding model that has changed fundamentally how research is done. We don't yet have a drug in the market that has been developed using these models. but it's fundamentally changed how everyone does research in the space so that the academy had no choice but to give them the Nobel Prize.

2:11And that was developed right here in London. Sorry, Will, I'm continuing this narrative of US versus Europe but in this case it's very true. We're seeing this happen time and time again. AI is having a huge impact on health and bio and Europe isn't just participating in it, Europe is leading it. So what do I know? I'm a scientist. I saw firsthand how tech and AI were impacting research. When I first saw the AlexNet paper come out in 2016, my mind was blown with all of the opportunities that could happen at the intersection of these two sciences. I decided to start a company to capture some of those.

2:48When we got acquired five years later, I went and did what a lot of you are doing now, became a VC. I was a generalist at first, focusing mainly on the US, because that's where I thought the opportunities were. and I wasn't wrong. There were a lot of great founders that I backed, a lot of great companies that I backed. So what the hell am I doing here talking to you about investing pre-seed and seed in health and bio? That's what we do at Amino. Well, it's because we all know ventures about outliers and I'm really relieved that we are at the very early stages of what is happening at this collision of AI and health and bio.

3:20And I think that Europe has all of the ingredients required to make the biggest companies the next huge healthcare giants in this space. the problems aren't unique to Europe. They're not unique to the US, they're not unique to China either. What we're seeing happen time and time again across all of these developed countries is the same pattern emerging. Aging populations, lack of workers that actually can care for them, and incredibly fast rising healthcare costs. But this is why I believe the solutions will be European. This might be the most controversial take you here all day, but I actually think regulation will be the biggest driver of long-term success for healthcare in particular.

4:03Healthcare data is seen incredibly differently to your data on browsing Reddit or TikTok. What we see is people are way more cautious with how they share that data, cautious with making sure that it's being used in the right way and the ability to be able to control what happens with that data and be able to pull it if they need to. What we see with public institutions like the NHS is an overwhelming majority of people like to share their healthcare data because they know it's being used purely for the purpose of delivering better healthcare. But when it comes to private institutions, that number's flipped.

4:38What we see, thanks to GDPR, is that a lot more people are willing to share their data because they have this idea of control of their data. They know what it's being used for. They know where it can go. They know that they can pull it if they need to. They probably won't, as no one ever cancels that gym subscription they signed up to in January. But they know they have that power if they want to. And that means they're way more likely to get involved in healthcare research and healthcare studies and give their data to private companies that are doing things to draw better insights, help patients like them and others.

5:13And that means in the future, we're going to have European companies with those data infrastructures in place that are able to pull out better insights from the healthcare data that's around. but it also means if we fast forward into the future a consumer in the u.s is going to be faced with a choice of relatively equal products they're going to go with the one that they trust the most in the healthcare system and that might be choosing the one that's american because that's because they have preference for american companies and that's true for a lot of people but i think the overwhelming majority of people are going to choose the ones that protect people's data right from the ground up.

5:51It's not just an afterthought. The company has decided that this is what they need to do right from the start. I think that's what's going to help Europe create the next apples of healthcare. On the bio side, this is a lot more, the story is a lot more simple. We have incredible talent. We have most of the top institutions around the world compared to any other region. And we have incredibly highly trusted, immense research output coming from those institutions. All of that means we have technical founders that have the environment to thrive. And now we're starting to see those technical founders start to become way more entrepreneurial in their thinking.

6:30Thanks to grassroots communities like Nucleate, some of the people that we support very closely, we're starting to see highly technical founders start to think about commercialization from day one of doing their science. And that's really important to building the biggest and best companies in this space. We also see incredibly stable sources of grant funding, which is not true for the US if you look at what's happening at the NIH right now. And I think all of that comes together to helping us build some of the biggest companies. And we're seeing that occur across our portfolio. You know, we've got companies like Sequeira based in Barcelona, selling to biopharma companies globally with their bioinformatic tool stack.

7:10We've got companies like Tandem, who's based in Sweden, selling all across Europe, reimagining how doctors and patients interact. You have, with them, you're able to have doctors spending more of their time interacting with patients rather than doing admin and writing notes for them. We also have companies like Sensable Bio, who's based across UK and Slovakia. And these guys are at the forefront of biosecurity. They're working on novel ways of manufacturing mRNA at scale where it's needed, when it's needed. and that's really important for helping Europe become way more pandemic prepared and actually anyone in the world become way more pandemic prepared and that's happening right here.

7:52So I'm just going to end there and say I really believe that the future of medicine is European. Thank you very much. Before you go I just want to give a massive shout out to the partners who made the EUVC Summit and Awards possible. So please do not tune out. We're partnering with these firms because they're great people with offerings that we know from our friends in the ecosystem are truly world-class. First up, I want to give a big thanks to HSBC Innovation Banking. They helped us incept the awards in the very beginning and truly they are the leading bank for anyone in European venture. There's a reason why everyone knows them.

8:28Google Cloud, they were our venue hosted the summit. What a team, what a big effort they put on to help us. We're hugely grateful. Make sure to reach out to Arabella or Roxana at the Google Cloud team to hear how they can help you as well as your portfolio. Massive credits goes to them. Ace Alternatives, we have so many friends in the Berlin ecosystem partnered with these guys. Just the best fund ops team around. And as with any good restaurant, where the locals are is also where you get the best service. And now they're expanding across Europe, so they're definitely someone to talk to. Hainspoon, they're longtime partners of ours in both our own legal work.

9:06They're great supporters of us here at EUEC. And I definitely think that they are one of the go-to legal teams to have in your corner. CW Communications, our dear friends who helped us secure CNBC, Bloomberg, Financial Times, and many more for this summer. It's a joy working with Dan and Kathy and the team. Fundcraft, Digital Native, Full Suite, Lux Headquarter, and a great partner as you grow your firm out of Luxembourg. definitely a fund admin to consider in your stack i can only say that the team are incredible to work with i'm very thankful that i've gotten to know them i think they're one of the up up and coming fund admins that you want to be thinking about portfolio iq by synaptic you may know them for the discover tool which is branded on a synaptic but portfolio iq is absolutely a product you should know because there's no one that understands intelligence better than this team And finally, Goodwin.

10:00They are a truly world-class legal partner you can trust. They're hands-on, business-oriented, an expert in everything and anything transatlantic. So those were our partners for the summit and awards. I know this might have been a bit long and boring, but really, if you have these guys on your side, I don't think your firm could be in any better hands. And also, they're helping us do what we're doing every day for you.