It is called a medical and agricultural tech incubator firm.
So what is an incubator firm?
An incubator firm is a firm that fosters early-stage companies through the developmental phases until such time as the company has sufficient financial, human and physical resources to function on its own.
It is like growing a child, you seek to provide for them with resources, when they are on all fours, until they finally grow up with a degree and can work to provide for themselves (and hopefully give you a share too).
Singapore has a few incubator programs (might be called Accelerators too), a list of some of them can be found here, where my prior workplace was involved in a partnership with Clearbridge Accelerator's subdivision (I actually tried to appy a job there as a tech but I never got it, oh well).
Generally speaking, such a firm can be either a non-profit (Singapore we have EDB and National Research Foundation) or a for-profit, and it can provide assistance via any or all of the following methods:
- Access to financial capital through relationships with financial partners
- Access to experienced business consultants and management-level executives
- Access to physical location space and business hardware or software and
- Access to informational and research resources via relationships with local universities and government entities.
Trendlines started in 2007 and incubated 60 companies, where 17 are in 'commercialisation' stage (making money or soon to make money) and are generating revenue. They have have 5 portfolio companies that have been acquired or sold their assets (selling the patents/technology for medical or farming applications in this case). They recently entered an agreement with a giant healthcare supplier, B. Braun (think about your hospital IV drips, needles, etc, they are kinda like the companies that makes all those, and from my experience, they kinda have a monopoly, if not a huge market share here), to purchase S$7.1 million of Trendlines shares too.
Looking at the Trendlines website, they mainly specialise in medical devices and technology (meniscus repair, renal care, etc) as well as agricultural technology (plants and fishes, there's a firm that optimise wine quality too :p), they seem to have competency not just in management as well as having some technical know-hows where they have their own in-house innovation labs too. Seems to be a big name in Israel, I believe that technical know-hows would accelerate new startups lacking in skilled manpower as well as picking the right startups that make sense.
You can see the list of their firms here.
Well, there is much more technical details (sciency stuff :p) but how about a short video about the company?
So what do you think about Trendlines? :)
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