BioCoder #12

Chapter 11. IndieBio Demo Day 2017

Glen Martin

At IndieBio’s fourth Demo Day, it was clear that a lot had changed. For one thing, the San Francisco biotech accelerator isn’t a mere upstart anymore. It has moved its semiannual event, which showcases its partner startups to potential investors, from The Foundry, a hip events center in San Francisco’s SOMA district, to the rococo interior of the Herbst Theatre, which can accommodate far more people.

“We just needed a bigger venue,” says Ryan Bethencourt, IndieBio’s cofounder and program director. “The Foundry only holds 400 or 500 people. The numbers have been increasing with each Demo Day since our first one two years ago, and it was getting to the point that people were feeling like sardines. The Herbst can hold close to a thousand, so we’re hoping that will suffice for a while.”

That may be overly optimistic. Though the Herbst was sufficiently capacious to accommodate the attendees at the February 19 Demo Day, it still somehow felt like a stopgap. The atmosphere was charged as company representatives presented their products and services on stage; it almost felt that the theater was crackling with ozone. Indeed, the event seemed to point to something larger: the acknowledgement, perhaps, that Next Generation biotech, the smaller, nimbler biotech, the biotech forged in DIY labs and bootstrap accelerators, the biotech that was truly representative of the 21st century, had arrived.

Moreover, observes Bethencourt, the growing interest ...