How do I choose a fundraising advisor or consultant for my biotech startup?

Not all advisors do the same thing

The biotech advisory market contains practitioners with fundamentally different functions, and the titles are not reliable guides to the function. A venture architect builds the investment architecture: equity story, milestone map, investor narrative. A scientific advisor provides peer credibility with institutional investors. A regulatory consultant ensures the development plan is defensible to the EMA and to VC scientific reviewers. A lawyer structures the IP and the term sheet.

The confusion arises because some advisors combine several of these functions, and others use general titles to describe narrow work. Before evaluating anyone, the first question is not who they are but what specific problem you need solved right now. Advisors who cannot describe clearly where their own expertise ends and a specialist's begins are usually describing their network as their competence.

For a founder preparing for a first institutional round in European biotech, the most urgent function is strategic: building the investment architecture before the first investor conversation. That is the work that determines whether everything else succeeds. An introduction to a serious VC before that architecture exists wastes one of the most valuable things you have: a first meeting.

The right question is not which advisor has the best network. It is which advisor will make your company ready to deserve that network.

The five questions worth asking before you sign anything

These questions are not a checklist. They are a diagnostic. The answers reveal whether the advisor understands your situation specifically or is describing their standard offering.

1. What specific deliverables will you produce, and by when? A serious advisor describes outputs, not activities. Equity story, milestone map, investor materials, EIC Accelerator positioning. If the answer is vague, the engagement will be too.
2. Have you worked directly with European institutional life sciences investors? European VC has specific structural expectations that differ from US norms. An advisor whose experience is primarily with US funds or with grant bodies will build the wrong architecture for a Sofinnova or Forbion conversation.
3. Can you show me examples of work you have produced for companies at a similar stage? Not client names, which confidentiality prevents. But anonymised milestone maps, equity story structures, or EIC proposals. How they describe their approach to this question tells you more than the examples themselves.
4. How do you handle investor introductions, and at what stage? An advisor who pushes for early introductions before the investment architecture is complete is prioritising activity over outcome. The introduction should happen when the thesis is strong enough to survive scrutiny, not before.
5. Where does your mandate end? Specifically: do you advise on term sheet negotiation? If yes, verify they have the legal expertise to do so responsibly. Strategic advisory and legal advisory are different disciplines, and blurring them creates risk for the founder.

What good preparation actually looks like in practice

The clearest signal that an advisor is serious is their insistence on building before introducing. The sequence matters more than most founders realise. European institutional VCs form early impressions quickly, and a first meeting that reveals an unprepared investment thesis rarely recovers. The fund has seen the asset in its incomplete state. Returning six months later with a revised story requires the fund to update an assessment that has already been filed mentally as a pass.

A good advisor slows the process down in the early weeks to make the investor conversations faster and more decisive later. They ask uncomfortable questions: which specific company would acquire this asset and why; what evidence would make that acquisition financially rational; what risk does this round retire and by how much does it move the valuation. If those questions feel premature, the architecture is not ready, and the introductions should wait.

An advisor who tells you what you want to hear is not protecting your interests. One who identifies the gaps in your thesis before investors do is.

What Leonardo Biondi does in this role

Leonardo Biondi is a Milan-based venture architect and Lecturer at Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele who works with biotech founders, principal investigators, and technology transfer offices across Europe on the preparation that precedes institutional fundraising. The work is architectural: equity story, milestone map, investor materials, EIC Accelerator positioning. It begins with an honest diagnostic of where the asset stands and what is missing, and it ends when the company is ready for the investor conversations that matter.

Leonardo's background spans twenty years at the intersection of research institutions, venture capital, and pharma partnerships across Europe and Asia. He has worked inside leading life sciences institutions, alongside investors, and with pharma partners across three continents. He knows what European VCs and pharma BD teams need to see, and he knows what most early-stage companies have not yet built.

When specific technical or legal expertise is needed, Leonardo brings in trusted specialists from his network, always with the client's prior agreement. The goal is a complete, coherent preparation, not a single-discipline output.

The starting point is a 30-minute call. It is free, it is diagnostic, and it is the most efficient way to find out whether the situation fits and what the most important first move is.

Frequently asked questions