Cascara Ventures

What is Cascara Ventures?

Cascara Ventures is a venture capital fund specializing in equity investments primarily focused on seed, startup, and early-stage companies within the life sciences sector. The firm, located at Bekestraat 22, Overijse, BE-3090, Belgium, was founded in 2016 by Adriaan Hart de Ruijter, an experienced entrepreneur and investor in life sciences.

Cascara Ventures dedicates itself to investing in companies that leverage technology for prevention, therapy, and research in a variety of areas including vaccines, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, imaging, software, medical data, robotics, healthcare services, diagnostics, and cell therapy.

They emphasize the importance of early-stage investing and take an active role in managing their portfolio companies, ensuring they meet the firm’s investment criteria.

Cascara Ventures offers extensive regulatory and clinical development expertise to their portfolio companies, which is a culmination of experience from hundreds of clinical trials and approvals. They operate within a collaborative network of investors and funds, each bringing a unique specialty to the table, enhancing their collective investment impact.

As an accredited investor with the European Investment Fund (EIF), Cascara Ventures' investments are matched on a pari passu basis by the EIF, permitting the firm to make larger commitments to a greater number of startups. Their consortium approach allows them to support companies through to mature stages, with the intent of creating global leaders in the market.

The firm aims to hasten clinical development and regulatory approval processes, achieving value milestones more quickly compared to conventional venture capital approaches.

What they say:

We focus on early-stage ventures utilizing technological advancements for health and scientific discovery.

What we look for: We invest in seed-stage companies that apply technology to prevention, therapy, and research.