Episode 200 Special: Joachim Eeckhout on building Labiotech and the future of biotech media

What It Covers

Joachim Eeckhout, cofounder of Labiotech and now co-owner of Knowbio, traces the platform's evolution from a free French-language student blog in 2012 to Europe's leading independent biotech media outlet, covering fundraising, acquisition by Impart in 2021, and the current AI-driven shift in science media.

Key Questions Answered

• •Media accessibility as a founding strategy: Labiotech launched in 2012 specifically to solve two concrete problems: biotech media remained in expensive print formats costing roughly €1,000 per year, and no free digital alternative existed. Targeting zero-cost, online-first content from day one built an audience that traditional publishers were structurally unable to serve, particularly students and early-career scientists.
• •Original content over curation as a growth lever: When scaling from the French platform to the pan-European site in 2014, Labiotech deliberately shut down labiotech.fr — even though it had higher traffic at the time — and committed exclusively to original reporting. Traffic on the European platform subsequently surpassed the French site, demonstrating that audience trust follows editorial investment, not aggregation volume.
• •Fundraising for media startups requires network-first thinking: Raising seed rounds in 2016–2017 as a media startup meant bypassing standard venture capital criteria entirely. The breakthrough came through a Berlin-based family office run by a media entrepreneur, which provided accelerator support and credibility to attract a small group of biopharma and media investors. Warm introductions, not cold pitches, drove the outcome.
• •Local presence as a competitive moat against AI-generated content: With AI enabling mass content production, Knowbio's strategy centers on reporters physically located in Europe covering European biotech. US outlets like STAT News and Endpoints News produce strong US coverage but lack boots-on-the-ground European presence, creating a defensible niche where verified, locally sourced reporting cannot be easily replicated algorithmically.
• •Early coverage of pre-breakthrough companies builds long-term brand authority: Labiotech covered BioNTech years before the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Mainz-based company was an obscure German mRNA startup. Consistently tracking early-stage companies with novel platform technologies — before mainstream recognition — positions a media brand as a credible primary source when those companies eventually scale into household names.