Monday September 3, 2007:

Self financing a Company from the Ground Up

Source: Biotechnology Focus Magazine
Posted Monday September 3, 2007
Author: Jon Yaneff


To possess the driving passion and commitment to continually advance life science internet software technologies in today's society is outright impressive, but to self finance the company from the ground up with zero outside resources is indescribable.

It is that passion with all its many sacrifices that has propelled Iseehear's three-headed entrepreneurial founders in its innovative life science internet software to use each piece of their different backgrounds and knowledge as they lead Iseehear's development to new heights.

Each founder provides a certain uniqueness from a combination of both science and business backgrounds.

The vision of Iseehear stems initially from developing web-based applications designed for mass market commercial use, which allows consumers to manage multiple aspects of their life in a centralized platform. This was mostly dealing with online and wireless communications.

CEO and one of the heads of business development, Jimmy Ayres, has had previous successes founding and building companies prior to Iseehear, which has made it possible for him to finance Iseehear from its inception in 2000.

"To finance the company up to this stage speaks volumes to the passion and innovation that's taken place here," states Ayres. "I think one of the key points here is not every entrepreneur could follow in our footsteps because if they don't have their own finances they'd have to get external funds, and that may be difficult."

Ayres adds that to build a company one needs components that are political, economic, social and the innovating component of technology, which all play a factor on the growth and health of the business.

None of his previous companies were biotech or technology based, but Ayres has been able to provide Iseehear with vision to help Iseehear transform ideas into new technology development.

Co-president and the head of product management, Elena Demireva, was still an undergraduate at the University of Toronto when she first met Ayres and heard his initial vision and product idea. Now she is the driving force behind the science applications that Iseehear develops. Demireva is currently completing her last year for her PhD in Neuroscience at Columbia University in northern Manhattan, NY, and is top in her class. She has the skills and unique knowledge for communicating customer requirements to Iseehear's business analysts.

The other co-president and other head of business development, Kelly Rodriques, was also an undergraduate, but of life science and human biology.

"When I met Jimmy and Elena, I was helping to bring the science aspect into fruition as well as the interest I had in business," she explains. "It was also a strong belief of the vision and the philosophy we all shared and we all saw the direction of science to moving in. I saw a good opportunity to contribute by moving this company forward."

So, Rodriques brings the best of both worlds for the company, as she has a solid grounding in science with an honours bachelor of science in human biology and biological anthropology from the University of Toronto and she is also instrumental in strategic planning and project execution from the business management side of things.

The Iseehear trio had always intended to build upon the technology it had, with the purpose of shifting its focus to the life sciences industry, as they did in 2002.

Ayres says part of the shift was because they already possessed two founders who had a thorough understanding of life sciences, but Iseehear also needed a specific niche on which the company could really grow.

"Elena and I had actually had a discussion in the summer of 2000, specifically involving the life science issue and we thought we'd get to it in maybe five years, but as it turns out once our initial application was developed we actually saw a greater need to immediately move into life sciences. We didn't just wake up one morning and it hit us. The move into life science was a five-year plan, but that plan became only 12 months and we had actually started the process."

Demireva was just beginning her scientific career when the Iseehear team had built its first prototype, but she was already encountering problems in managing research.

"Once I started playing with the prototype by testing it, it occurred to me that the same application can be applied to the scientific field. We then wrote a product description for a new concept, where we took the initial technology and evolved it into a science application," exclaimed Demireva. "We also really had to focus on researching the users' environment and their requirements. We did a two prong approach where one came from my personal insight as a scientist to the world of life science and how researchers conduct their work and interact, but we also had to conduct a market research study involving other researchers. We then pulled researchers from different universities across the United States including Columbia University, Stanford University as well as the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia."

"As a result of this we discovered that the need of organizing research exists in the small biotech companies that have been emerging during the last 10 years. So, we needed to relate to the managing of the research process, which meant managing of the process and managing with the data associated with the whole process," says Ayres.

What makes Iseehear unique is other competitors out there are structured with vehicle solutions chronologically in terms of gathering the data, whereas Iseehear's approach is not simply an electronic notebook used to record data, what it does is provide a framework to capture the entire search and experiment process.

The way Iseehear's products work is that there is a platform that the user can populate with different modules. One of these is its multi-application environment (MAE), which is a piece of core technology within its life science piece and sits on its core platform including a system manager.

"We are offering it as a software as a service (SaaS), which the user would pay per user per month. It is designed to meet specific and user market needs based on the users' budget, so we're trying to address flexibility within the users' budget," explains Rodriques. "We don't think it's necessary to offer a huge package software that comes with 10 different pieces of software because we know the user may only need two or three of them. So instead of offering them a 10 piece product software at a certain cost that they may not use, we offer flexibility and what we call a, choose what you use platform'. They can choose which modules they want to use, when they want to use them and the length of time they want to use them for, in order to better manage their budget."

Iseehear also uses another model software service, SOA (software oriented architecture), which is a key to delivering web services over the Internet as the company moves toward its goal to deliver what couldn't be done in the past.

Iseehear's technologies and processes are not limited to the biomedical and life sciences sector, as its applications extend to any business sector that requires the creating, capturing, manipulation, sharing and integration of data.

Iseehear's product portfolio includes its My Life player, which was initially developed for the commercial environment, where a lot of people would be social networking with each other. Iseehear also produces its Transgenic Mouse Management module, which is a web-based management system for mouse genetic experiments, transgenic mouse breeding and mouse line colony maintenance designed for scientists who conduct research involving mouse genetics and related experiments.

"The mouse is one of the most widely used model genetic organisms by researchers across the biomedical life science world," said Demireva.

The Iseehear team is going to continue to focus on improving its applications into the future.

"With respect to our life science research management product we're going to continue to develop and improve the product and one specific area we're going to focus a lot of development in the near future is actually developing applications to specific modules and functionalities. As we develop that we will continue to be useful for researchers in the field, whether its stem cell research, neuroscience, molecular biology and genetics, as we are developing applications that are specific for those niches, while adding those to modules to the base platform or core technology," said Demireva.

Ayres also points out that Iseehear wouldn't be where it is today if it wasn't for its external advisory council, who open doors for Iseehear with its past experiences from running corporations.

"We had a strategic plan that addressed a lot of the core areas within our company and we knew we needed to target certain people to help us. We sat down and singled out the best from business operations, the life sciences field, telecommunications, privacy and governance as well as legal advisors both in Canada and the United States."

Ayres singles out a key advisor, president of Gleeson & Associates, Frank Gleeson, who resides as the director of the external advisory council. Gleeson has 20 years of leadership and business building experience and has completed over $500 million in partnering transactions.

Glesson founded MDS Proteomics Inc. as president and CEO, was the senior vice-president and partner with MDS Capital Corp. and most recently served as president and CEO of the Williamson Group. He is also the chair of the stem cell network in Canada.

Iseehear has also learned from presenting at the BioFinance 2007 Conference in April and the Canadian Venture Forum in March.

"These were great opportunities for us in terms of emerging from our little garage as we were developing our product. We had a lot of great feedback from the people there and we met several individuals from the financing and customer side, as well as just recruiting different members for our advisory council," said Rodriques.

"It's great we're receiving validation from the community that we're on the right path to being a service provider of the future to relate to researchers and scientists in life science and that was humbling for us," Ayres added. "Whenever people are engaged in the research process of managing the data, our platform will be ideal for managing that process."

As for Iseehear's future plans, it is currently in discussions with Dr. Leonore Herzenberg of Stanford University. The two will collaborate by taking advantage of the synergies that exist between its two technologies in order to create innovative and intuitive web-based services to release to the academic and biotechnology space.