Planning Your Biotech Fundraise, Timing & More
We're excited to close the year with Centivax CBO, Author of Building Backwards to Biotech, and former Biotech VC, Stephanie Wisner. This talk will focus on identifying and planning around inflection points in your company to set it up for a successful fundraise.
About Stephanie Wisner
Stephanie Wisner is an accomplished biotech operational leader and venture capitalist with experience guiding startups through fundraising milestones. She currently leads finance and ops at Centivax. Previously she helped develop commercialization strategies and secure capital for Biotech startups, and supported early-stage companies at ARCH Venture Partners by conducting deep diligence. She is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, the author of Building Backwards to Biotech, and teaches life science entrepreneurship as visiting faculty at Cornell University.
Full Bio
Stephanie Wisner received her bachelor’s in Chemistry & Chemical Biology from Cornell University and holds an MBA from University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. Stephanie combines her background in basic science with her experience in business to lead finance and operations for Centivax.
Previously, Stephanie conducted independent research projects in chemical biology at Cornell, University of Michigan, and Pfizer. She began working with biotech start-ups after founding her own consulting business, in which she worked with the leadership of over 15 scientific start-ups to develop commercialization strategy and complete capital raising. She has also worked as an Analyst at ARCH Venture Partners, where she partnered with Managing Directors, Partners, and Associates to perform deep diligence on early stage scientific technologies, assessing them for potential investments and developing market landscape investment theses for close to 200 scientific companies; as well as assisting ARCH portfolio companies in building their businesses through coaching and business development work. While at Booth, she worked as an Associate with the $20M seed fund (George Shultz Innovation Fund), providing strategic consulting to life science university spin outs and performing diligence on potential investments.
Her book, Building Backwards to Biotech, is taught as part of bio-entrepreneurial curriculum at multiple universities, including Dartmouth College and Cornell University. She is a visiting faculty member and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Cornell Johnson School of Business, where she teaches the graduate course Life Science Entrepreneurship. In 2022, she was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 List for Healthcare.