Startup investing goes mainstream
DEALMAKER IS PROVIDING NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR ORDINARY INVESTORS
Access to venture capital funding is critical for startups that are hoping to achieve their vision. But VC money has traditionally only been available to a small set of wellconnected founders. Dealmaker was founded with the mission to disrupt the old model and democratize capital markets—opening up early-stage investing to everyone. The company’s commitment to breaking down barriers and empowering its employees to pursue bold new ideas helped land it on Fast Company ’s list of Best Workplaces for Innovators. Here, Dealmaker Cofounder and CEO Rebecca Kacaba reveals how Dealmaker’s culture of innovation is helping the firm reshape access to capital for startups while bringing new opportunities to everyday investors.
1 Given Dealmaker’s emphasis on innovation, what traits do you look for in your employees?
One of our core values at Dealmaker is that we are in the business of change—so, we’re comfortable in a constant state of change where others aren’t. One of the ways that’s reflected in our culture is in our emphasis on a new concept called adaptability quotient (AQ). Unlike intelligence quotient or emotional intelligence, AQ measures a person’s resilience, flexibility, and ability to embrace—and thrive—with change. These traits are crucial for employees in a technology company like ours that’s breaking new ground in a new field, where we’re constantly working to improve upon the last thing we did. Because we may just throw out something that we built yesterday if we can build something better tomorrow.
2 How is your business model driving change in venture capital?
We’re democratizing access to capital for founders and leveling the playing field for everyday investors. In the traditional venture capital world, only about two percent of funding goes to women and minority founders. That’s a shockingly low number. At Dealmaker, we believe that good ideas should be recognized and funded as such. So, we are really proud to be leaders in what we call community capital raising, where in 2022 we saw approximately 30% of funding going to women and minority founders. At the same time, we’re bringing access to early-stage investment opportunities to everyday investors, where it was previously only available to the very wealthy, highly connected, or institutions. Average people can now invest in preipo companies with tremendous upside potential.
3 How is Dealmaker leveraging AI and machine learning to drive innovation?
Early on, we recognized how valuable the data we were collecting was and what a game-changer it was for our clients. So, we launched a machine learning investor-ranking algorithm that helps our customers predict which users are most likely to invest and which are just browsing. This allows our clients to better direct their marketing efforts and to, ultimately, raise capital much more efficiently, saving time and money. Fast forward to today, and we now provide that anonymized, aggregate data to industry analysts to better understand this new emerging space and the trends within it. This is allowing us to close in on our goal of becoming the Amazon Web Services of the capital markets. Whenever we are thinking of launching something new, we ask ourselves, “Is this a faster horse, or is it a car?” You have to be sure that you’re giving people not just what they need but also the car they didn’t even know to ask for.
work has been the acceleration and scaling of our pipeline.”
To support that pipeline, Moderna has been expanding. Head count has grown from about 800 pre-pandemic to roughly 4,000 today, and the company plans to add another 2,000 employees by the end of the year. Its original building in Norwood, meanwhile, has morphed into a 500,000-plus-square-foot campus, known as the Moderna Technology Center, or MTC.
If MRNA is the platform, this campus is what powers the company’s uniquely iterative approach to drug development. Here, an LEED Gold–certified building called MTC North serves as Moderna’s internal R&D factory, rapidly producing the raw materials that Moderna scientists need to design and refine new therapies at the company’s labs in Cambridge. Teams at MTC North make small batches of experimental materials to order—generally, pieces of MRNA encased in lipid nanoparticles—in about 30 to 40 days, which is really fast in biotech time. Automation is key to this speed. “Larger, more traditional companies have layered their automation on top of their existing processes,” says Nick Guziewicz, Moderna’s executive director of technological development operations. “Moderna was built with automation in mind from the get-go.”
Nearby, a building known as MTC South houses what investors hope will be Moderna’s next big product: an experimental personalized cancer therapy called MRNA4157. In Phase 2 trials, the therapy cut the risk of recurrence or death in advanced melanoma (after surgical resection) by 65% when combined with Merck’s drug Keytruda, compared with Keytruda alone. The FDA granted MRNA-4157 Breakthrough Therapy Designation in February, which could speed reviews of future trials. Enrollment in Phase 3 trials should begin later this year.
The material for those trials will be manufactured at MTC South, with each dose custom-generated for a particular patient. Unlike a conventional vaccine, MRNA-4157 doesn’t protect you from getting cancer but rather trains the immune system to attack an existing tumor. Creating the treatment involves sequencing a patient’s tumor, using machine learning to identify the antigens (proteins produced by genetic mutations) that make their cancer unique, and picking 34 that the algorithm predicts will elicit the strongest immune response. The Moderna team must then build a DNA plasma template that encodes the MRNA sequences that produce these antigens— creating the starting material for the therapy. In all, the manufacturing process takes about six weeks.
Scott Nickerson, SVP of individualized neoantigen therapy manufacturing, is in charge of this effort, applying everything he learned from ramping up the manufacture of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine to a very different, totally personalized product. He’s been hiring roughly 100 people a month—in technical services, quality, and manufacturing teams—and developing workflows that enable the simultaneous production of treatments for multiple patients with no mix-ups. “Everything that we build is trying to accommodate the current state but also anticipate the future,” he says.
Bringing an MRNA cancer treatment to market—with a likely price