R&D Partnering with Kevin Leland

Welcome to the Axial podcast. Axial is an early stage investment firm based in San Francisco. We partner with great founders and inventors investing in early stage life science companies often when they are no more than an idea. Axial is fanatical about helping the right venture who's compelled to build their own and journey business. Kevin, we really appreciate you taking the time to do this podcast. I'm really excited to talk about your story and Halo. Maybe to start off with you introduction yourself and what Halo does. Sounds good. Yeah. It's great to be here, Josh. I'm Kevin Leland, the founder and CEO of of halo.science. We are an AI powered platform for scientific innovators. We help, scientists and science led startups connect directly with corporate r and d teams to collaborate and, bring their innovations to market. And so what's the overarching, like, mission of Halo? Is there, like, a North Star goal, like accelerate science or something that kind of drives the whole company forward? Yeah. Well, I would you know, our overarching mission is is move science forward, which is just three words, but there's so many things that are standing in the way of moving science forward. And one of those is just simply making the the right connections between the the science with the the technology or expertise and the the companies that can actually turn it into something commercial. And so that kinda translates into everything that we do at Halo to remove that friction so more science can be commercialized. The vision of Halo was really to do for r and d partnering what, LinkedIn did for, recruiting and job searching. Absolutely. And, you know, how do you how do you think about building that network, of not only partners and corporates and cost and and, you know, large companies and scientists and ventures? And how do you go about how did you go about, like, bootstrapping that network, and where did you start? Great question. So where I started was well, why don't we go back a little bit further maybe? I don't know. I'll I'll tell you about the origin of of Halo, which isn't exactly what it is right now, but it will kinda lead into answering that question. So the original idea for Halo was actually different. It was around crowdfunding, research at universities. So, you've probably heard of the valley of death and drug development. You have these promising technologies that, don't need, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars or even millions of dollars. They need a half $1,000,000 to do some derisking project and to kinda get it to the next stage. But, they can't get that $500,000, so they wind up in the proverbial, valley of death. So the idea was, hey. Why don't we tap into alumni at the university and these foundations to, who care about that particular, topic area and then raise that money to fund that project and …