'I bet on the jockey and not the horse': Biotope Incubator's Annick Verween on how to turn groundbreaking research into profitable companies

The Flemish Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) is not the most famous spot in the world of agritech. But, as a hub bringing together 1500 of the top-researchers from Belgian universities, it is, as Annick Verween says: “a bit of a hidden gem”.

Verween is the head of VIB’s Biotope Incubator, a pre-seed incubator programme and early investor that takes on promising early-stage start-ups and “gives them an MBA in biotech” to try and turn them into seed-stage companies within 18 months.

VIB launched Biotope in 2022 to bring its expertise in turning groundbreaking research into profitable companies – its track-record includes Biotalys​, a now listed bio-control company – to other budding start-ups around the world.

Biotope is unusual on this front in that it acts as both incubator and investor. Start-ups join the incubator for an initial three-week basecamp which effectively acts as a selection process for a €250k investment package that comes alongside 18 months of support and access to VIB’s experts and cutting-edge R&D facilities.

The €250k is “very risky” with the “chances of return at almost zero”, Verween says, but Biotope’s philosophy is to help start-ups escape the viscous cycle in which they need investment to fix certain issues, but investors will not commit until those issues are fixed.

For those with sufficient promises awaits Biotope Ventures – a separate investment fund with seven limited partners, including VIB – that is looking to invest up to €3m for a minority stake in start-ups ready to take the next step.

So far, 13 companies have come through the incubator programme of which Biotope invested in three at seed stage. While some haven’t made it to seed stage at all, others Biotope opted against. “We had one company where we stopped… because although we still believe in the technology, you do have this magic of the team, right? Every investor will say, I bet on the jockey and not the horse. I need to acknowledge that is true.”

Verween herself is a marine biologist by trade who gradually migrated into biotech start-ups. And having commercialised numerous patents herself, she launched Biotope to help those with good ideas but lacking the business acumen to bring them to market.

“Six years ago, this whole agritech start-up community was still a work in progress with lots of hype around it and a lot of money available to bet on successful horses. For me, the money went to the people who could really sell the potential of a technology meaning, they were the storytellers. They were the ones who could convince people of promises.”

The problem, she continues, is there was – and still is - too much belief among investors that the people who build a company are a done deal with a clean route for turning an idea borne in a lab into a revenue-driving business.

Verween holds a refreshing attitude towards an agritech sector that often feels dominated by smart young guys with more PhDs than Isaac Asimov books.

“Biotech has this fancy word but it can be much more basic,” she argues. “We must step away from this typical ‘you need to have done deep-tech in a university lab for six years and need to wear your lab coat from morning till evening.’

“We’ve had people who reached out to us without a PhD and asked if they can still apply. Which is the biggest nonsense when you're an entrepreneur with a solution to a problem.”

Adressing the glass ceiling

Verween is also intent on helping shift the sector’s gender balance. “I'm still blown away by going to these pitching competitions and seeing its 85% young, white guys, 30 to 40”. Among investors too, she says, “the analysts are very often the ladies but the higher up in management, the more males you have.”

Biotope is therefore built on promoting diversity in everything from the structure of the teams to the language of the selection phase. It is not a bootcamp, for example, but a basecamp. The core Biotope team, meanwhile, is three ladies plus Peter, the investment manager. “He’s a white 50 [year-old] guy, because I also wanted diversity in my team.”

The plan seems to be working with 85% of Biotope’s companies now made up of mixed-gender teams, a proportion Verween estimates is about five times the sector average.

One of those is AmphiStar, a biosurfactant company that recently raised €6m at pre-Series A. AmphiStar was founded by a team of four – including three women – out of Ghent University, using waste products to make an ecological surfactant. 

It is one of the three firms Biotope Ventures has invested in so far. The other two are not yet disclosed.

Unusually for Biotope, AmphiStar has started out targeting the cosmetics industry due to the sector’s lower regulatory threshold and is now collaborating with Ecover to bring its cleaning product to market.

However, as its product can also be used to eliminate plant pathogens and remediate soil, Verween says the next phase is to produce bigger volumes to try and appeal to agricultural suppliers.  

Its gradual success so far is indicative of Biotope’s approach. “The fact that we do not push start-ups through a programme where you need to drop everything for four months. You can still run your business, be there with your family, be flexible,” explains Verween. “That's definitely part of the secret sauce here.”