Eckhardt Weber (Manag. Partner, Heal Capital)
Eckhardt is a lawyer by training, but has always been involved in healthcare. In 2017, he founded the digital health platform Heartbeat Labs, where he was responsible for business development, investments and investor relations and was operationally involved in building companies. Today, he is Managing Partner at Heal Capital, a Berlin-based early-stage venture capitalist firm for HealthTech companies.
Can you explain your job to a five year old?
Being sick is not cool. Unfortunately, it happens to all of us. We want to help people get less sick or healthy faster. But I am not a doctor or a nurse. What we do is, we talk to smart people who use computers to keep people healthy. However, often their ideas do not work like they expected. We help them fix those ideas so we can bring them to you and me and everybody who needs them.
What excites you most about your job?
The great people I have the pleasure of working with every day. They are all so motivated and mission-driven to achieve their goals, which then helps people be healthier—it’s just great. Plus, I love constant learning.
Which trend will change the future of medicine?
To pick two here: Consumerization and AI. Consumerization being healthcare as frictionless and easy to use, like booking airline tickets or ordering amazon and having full control over what is happening. AI being used everywhere, but especially along the whole pharma value chain and up to diagnosis and treatment. The amount of data we create each day just needs a machine to analyze them for us.
Looking back, which trends have you missed or underestimated?
Mental health. I felt there was an increasing demand. But what is happening now accelerated by covid—we just need more frictionless offerings for people, young and old, to help them cope with the everyday challenges of a completely changed world. I just did not expect it to become such a huge topic. The USA is leading the way with multiple $100 million USD funding rounds just in the last weeks—all for mental health companies.
Which MedTech initiative or startup deserves more attention?
I need to mention one of our own, Ceregate. They’re building a more robust computer-brain-interface. It’s just crazy what they can do. But I want to put it into the bigger picture. Medtech is a software business now, at least in many areas. And Ceregate is a good example for that. We will see many more medtech products being developed software-first or upgraded by software in the future.
Where would you put a million dollars?
Coming back to the trend, I believe someone with a great approach to tackling some of the increasing mental health burdens would definitely get my money.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Understand the incentives driving the behaviour.