Scaling innovation through investment partnerships
March 13, 2025
Danaher is well-known for operational excellence and mergers and acquisitions (M&A). What role does Danaher Ventures LLC play in this ecosystem?
M&A is a powerful mechanism for bringing mature technologies, capabilities and talent under the Danaher umbrella. Our venture function, on the other hand, allows us to foster novel technological innovation and tap into early-stage entrepreneurship. While we have incredible engines for innovation within Danaher, we have the opportunity to nurture and integrate external innovation with our internal capabilities to achieve our goals at the speed required to really benefit patients. We link our investments intimately with our internal scientific strategy and our organic R&D efforts so that we can drive major transformations with our partners within our areas of interest: life sciences, diagnostics, biotechnology and biomanufacturing, and novel therapeutic platforms.
How is Danaher Ventures different from a traditional venture capital firm?
In the traditional model, the first – and really only – metric of success is financial return. We are a strategic investor, which means that both financial returns and the strategic advancement of core solutions and products that augment Danaher R&D and the broader Danaher strategy, are important. With the pace of innovation continuing to accelerate, it’s imperative that we are agile and able to support innovation that drives impact beyond traditional scaling laws. We’re interested in innovation at scale to positively impact billions of lives on this planet.
Related to operational excellence, we’re distinct from a traditional venture firm in that we leverage the Danaher Business System (DBS) along with rigorous market and customer research to deeply understand where innovation is needed and how it ultimately impacts the patient or the customer, all anchored in a lean philosophy to drive significant transformational change.
How is this difference reflected in your relationships with the companies you invest in?
It is a distinct relationship from a traditional financial VC. Depending on the situation, we may bring our network of capital partners to the table to help finance the company. But really, we give these companies much more than capital. In many cases, they have access to the leading scientific talent and market intelligence within Danaher and they can leverage our commercial expertise and capabilities to help them scale. We can advise on operational efficiency using DBS and can deploy specific DBS tools to enhance their business.
Most importantly is how we partner the companies in which we invest with Danaher companies, like Cytiva, Aldevron, and Beckman Coulter Diagnostics to name a few. A great example of this is our recent investment with Innovaccer. In addition to contributing to the company’s Series F fundraise, we are working with our colleagues across our Diagnostics businesses and with Innovaccer to speed the development and deployment of precision diagnostics at scale across health systems. This partnership provides Innovaccer with opportunities that traditional capital can’t buy, and Danaher with a highly dynamic AI-centric partner focused on patient health.
What kinds of investments does Danaher Ventures make and what do you look for in founders?
We have two main investment vehicles right now. The first is the investment partnership, as I described with Innovaccer, where in addition to capital, the company and Danaher form a partnership. These partnerships could involve co-developing, co-marketing, co-distributing the technology, to name a few. For these investments, we are looking for serial entrepreneurs and founding teams with clear passion and drive, and who have a proven track record of translating innovation into impactful products and successful companies. As we are focused on large-scale change, these technologies need to be backed by an effective and strong team.
The second is what we call the “Pioneer Program,” and this leverages venture creation to develop transformative companies with new and differentiated products that address key challenges in healthcare and address specific Danaher portfolio product gaps. Here, we work with leading entrepreneurs and scientific experts across academia and industry to originate these companies, based on their pioneering research, technology and intellectual property, and accelerate their path to commercialization and patient impact.
An example is BlueWhale Bio, which is developing a novel solution to improve cell and gene therapy manufacturing. We worked with founders Carl June and James Riley at the University of Pennsylvania to launch the company, secure multiple rounds of funding, and they are now collaborating with Cytiva to develop a portfolio of products with the potential to bring the benefits of cell therapy to patients faster and at lower cost.
From your perspective at the forefront of innovation, how do you see the life sciences and healthcare evolving in the long term?
As an electrical and computer engineer by training who has worked in the world of semiconductor manufacturing and data sciences, it is clear how these scientific and applied fields, along with AI, are converging. Biology is now being understood at the molecular level of proteins and DNA – the nanoscale – and that is the scale that semiconductors have been developed for decades.
The biological tools industry can learn so much from the semiconductor industry in terms of the scale, precision, instrumentation quality and reliability, as well as the ability to mass-fabricate these highly technical tools and solutions.
Weave this in with the advances we’re seeing with data and AI for complex pattern recognition and insight generation, and I believe that in the not too-distant future we will come to a point where biology transitions to an applied science which is more deterministic, and the technologies that we’re fostering and partnering to develop through Danaher and Danaher Ventures LLC are going to play a big role in that.
Innovation driven by collaboration
