Most healthtech founders approach their seed round the wrong way. They treat it as a pitch competition: build a deck, send it to a list of investors, and wait to see who bites. The founders who raise quickly, at better terms, do something different. They treat fundraising as a structured commercial process, and they prepare for it the same way they would prepare for a product launch or a clinical trial. Rigorously, systematically, and well before they need the money.
I have raised capital for healthtech companies at every stage from pre-seed to Series B, and I spent years on the other side of the table in investment banking. What follows is what I actually tell founders when they come to us preparing to raise.
Know exactly what you are raising and why
The first question any serious investor will ask is not “what does your product do?” It is “why are you raising this amount, and what does it get you?” A £1.5M seed round that gets you to a specific clinical milestone, a defined regulatory submission, or a clear point of commercial traction is a fundable proposition. A £1.5M seed round that buys you eighteen months of runway with no defined endpoint is not.
Before you approach a single investor, you need to be able to answer three questions with precision. What milestone does this round fund you to? What does achieving that milestone do to your valuation and your ability to raise the next round? And what is the probability that you get there on this budget? Investors are underwriting a journey, not a snapshot. They need to believe the destination is real and that your map is credible.
Your deck is not your pitch, your narrative is
A pitch deck is a leave-behind. The actual pitch is the story you tell in the room, and the two need to be aligned. We see a lot of healthtech decks that are scientifically rigorous and commercially incoherent. They explain the mechanism of action in detail, include beautiful diagrams of the product architecture, and then bury the market opportunity in slide eleven with a generic TAM/SAM/SOM chart that no investor believes.
The narrative arc of a successful healthtech seed pitch is simple: here is a real clinical or commercial problem, here is why existing solutions do not solve it, here is our approach and why it works, here is the evidence we have so far, and here is what we will do with your money. Everything else, including team, IP, regulatory pathway, and financials, is supporting material. If you cannot tell that story in under five minutes without slides, you are not ready to be in investor meetings.
Understand who you are actually pitching
UK healthtech seed rounds are typically funded by a combination of angel investors with healthcare or life sciences backgrounds, specialist early-stage healthtech funds, and in some cases strategic investors from the NHS, pharma, or medical device ecosystems. Each of these investor types has different motivations, different risk tolerances, and different things they need to see before they will write a cheque.
A life sciences angel who has exited a diagnostics company will zoom straight to your clinical validation strategy and your regulatory pathway. A generalist seed fund will focus on market size and team. A pharma corporate venture arm will want to understand how your product fits into their pipeline or their customer base. Pitching all three the same way is a mistake. Before you approach any investor, research their portfolio, understand their thesis, and tailor your narrative accordingly. This is not manipulation. It is basic commercial intelligence.
The regulatory pathway is a fundraising asset, not a liability
One of the most common mistakes we see healthtech founders make is treating the regulatory pathway as something to apologise for. “We’ll need CE marking, which will take twelve to eighteen months…” delivered with a wince. Sophisticated healthtech investors do not hear that and think “problem.” They hear it and think “barrier to entry.” A credible, well-sequenced regulatory pathway is a signal that you understand your market and that you have thought seriously about what it takes to build a sustainable business in it.
Present your regulatory strategy as a competitive advantage. Know your pathway, whether that is MDR Class IIa, IVDR, FDA 510(k), or something else. Know your evidence requirements and know your timeline. If you can show an investor that you have already had a pre-submission conversation with a notified body or the FDA, even better. That level of preparation is rare at seed stage, and it dramatically increases investor confidence.
Build your investor list before you start pitching
The worst fundraising processes we see are the ones where founders send their deck to every investor they can find and then manage a chaotic, asynchronous process where everyone is at a different stage. The best ones are tightly managed, with a targeted list of twenty to thirty investors who are genuinely right for the round, approached in a deliberate sequence designed to create momentum.
Start with investors who are likely to move quickly: angels and smaller funds with shorter decision cycles. Use those early conversations to sharpen your pitch and generate social proof. By the time you get to your priority targets, you want to be able to say that the round is partially committed and moving fast. Investors are herd animals. Nothing accelerates a decision like the credible threat that the opportunity is closing.
Get your financial model right before you go out
A financial model for a seed-stage healthtech company is not a forecast. No one believes your five-year revenue projections and sophisticated investors know it. What a model needs to demonstrate is that you understand your unit economics, your cost structure, and the key assumptions that drive the business. It needs to show a plausible path to the next funding milestone, and it needs to stress-test cleanly. Investors will probe your assumptions and you need to be able to defend them without the model falling apart.
We build financial models for our clients before every fundraising process, and the discipline of building a rigorous model consistently surfaces strategic issues that need to be resolved before you sit down with investors. If your model only works under optimistic assumptions, that is a product strategy problem, not a spreadsheet problem. Better to find out in the model than in a due diligence process.
A final note on timing
Raise before you need to. The founders who get the best terms are the ones who approach the market from a position of relative strength: they have runway, they have recent positive news, and they are not visibly desperate. The founders who get the worst terms, or who fail to close at all, are the ones who waited too long and are fundraising with three months of cash left. In a healthtech business, where timelines are long and milestones are binary, this is especially dangerous. Start building investor relationships twelve months before you intend to raise. By the time you are ready to go to market, you want warm contacts, not cold outreach.
David Weiss is Director of Fundraising and Commercial Strategy at GoldWhite. He has raised over £6M for clients across investment rounds and grant applications, and previously worked as an equity derivatives trader at Goldman Sachs and an M&A analyst at Leonardo & Co.