Steven Dresner

Capped Out: 10 Common Problems for HealthTech Founders with Venture Capital backed Cap Tables HealthTech founders, while navigating the complex healthcare landscape, often find themselves facing unique challenges related to their venture capital-backed cap tables. A cap table, or capitalization table, details the equity ownership of a company. When VCs enter the picture, it introduces a new dynamic that can lead to significant problems if not managed carefully. Here are 10 common problems for HealthTech founders with VC-backed cap tables: 1) Excessive Founder Dilution, Especially Early On 2) Unplanned Employee Stock Option Pools (ESOPs) and Their Dilution 3) Complicated or "Messy" Cap Tables 4) Misaligned Investor Expectations and Short-Term Focus 5) Loss of Control and Undue Investor Influence 6) Punitive Anti-Dilution Provisions for Early Investors 7) Valuation Traps and Unrealistic Expectations 8) Vesting Schedule Issues 9) Difficulty Attracting Future Investors Due to a "Broken" Cap Table 10) Lack of Liquidity Planning and Secondary Sales Founders for Founders > Nelson Advisors pride ourselves on our DNA as ‘HealthTech entrepreneurs advising HealthTech entrepreneurs.’ Nelson Advisors partner with entrepreneurs, boards and investors to maximise shareholder value and investment returns. www.nelsonadvisors.co.uk

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Check out the latest from Limbic - their breakthrough study in Nature Portfolio, shows how Limbic turns frontier language models into behavioral health specialists. In their pre-registered, double-blind randomized trial they showed that: 1️⃣ Adding the Limbic Layer improves AI-led therapy performance by 43% 2️⃣ Clinicians preferred Limbic over general-purpose LLMs 83% of the time 3️⃣ 74% of Limbic's AI sessions ranked among the top 10% of therapists 4️⃣ Patients rate the Limbic experience as comparable to clinician-led sessions Amazing stuff from Ross Harper and Sebastiaan de Vries - delighted to have them in the Entrepreneurs First portfolio.

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What can Warburg Pincus LLC's $1B investment into mega RIA platform Cerity Partners tell us about where the wealth management industry is headed? The deal is emblematic of a number of current industry trends, which a recent report from ECHELON Partners highlighted. ➡️ Cerity Partners could continue to look for culture-aligned firms to merge into its platform, as it did recently with its merger with Verus. ➡️ M&A wealth management deal volume should continue to go from strength to strength, particularly for firms with $1B AUM and greater. ➡️ Continued consolidation will likely be driven by RIAs. Over 73% of 2025 acquisitions were completed by RIAs. ➡️ Private equity will continue to be a defining feature of today's wealth management market structure and will continue to shape the industry going forward. Almost 76% of 2025’s deals involved a private equity sponsor, either via a direct investment by a PE firm or a PE-backed RIA platform that consolidated with another wealth management firm. ➡️ Private markets meets private wealth. The growth of scaled platforms in the wealth management space has had a ripple effect on private markets and on the distribution of private markets solutions to the wealth channel. KKR's 2025 RIA Private Markets Survey highlighted that many advisors were looking to increase exposure to private markets. ➡️ Scale will bring the question (and challenge) of how RIAs balance customization with efficiency to the forefront of their business building activities. Perhaps this helps to explain recent OCIO consolidation, including Hightower Advisors / NEPC, LLC, Cresset / Monticello Associates, Cerity Partners / Agility and Cerity Partners / Verus. What does all of this mean for wealth management firms and alternative asset managers? Read on for more👇 This week's Alt Goes Mainstream's AGM Alts Weekly, brought to you by DealsPlus, covers: 🗂️ AGM Index, an index that tracks the leading publicly traded alternative asset managers. 💻 Who is hiring: Senior-level positions from companies Blackstone, KKR, Apollo Global Management, Inc., Ares Management, EQT Group, Blue Owl Capital, Franklin Templeton, Fortress Investment Group, iCapital, Goldman Sachs, Partners Group, Ultimus Fund Solutions, Krilogy, MSCI Inc. Subscribe👇 to see the latest trends & navigate this rapidly changing landscape as alts go mainstream. https://lnkd.in/ewX-6sub

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💡Emerging GP Fundraising Insight #8: Rolling Closes Keep You Moving Small funds can't always afford to sit still until the target is hit. Rolling closes let you start deploying earlier, build a track record, and show momentum to prospective LPs. One GP told me that for Fund I ($5M target), he took capital as it came, signed, wired, and got to work. It wasn't perfect, but it kept the lights on and the deals moving. Sometimes the "sign and wire as it comes" approach is the only way to get moving. Takeaway: Momentum is a fundraising asset and rolling closes can help you keep it. Has anyone here used rolling closes as a strategic advantage?

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I’m so proud that Hyphen Capital has been a backer of Tim Hwang and Jonathan Chen since the beginning of Nitra. They had big ambitions to modernize the archaic back office of healthcare practices from fax machines to AI. It’s been amazing to see their growth from processing zero transactions to over a billion dollars and they’re just getting started.

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How to fund a compelling deal without rushing to syndicate or overlever Here’s the step-by-step we’ve used more than once this year: 1. Underwrite conservatively, then challenge it. If it only works in a rosy scenario, it doesn’t work. 2. Structure for alignment, not just returns. Preferred equity, profit share, or GP-like mechanics—use what makes everyone show up at 100%. 3. Pressure test your assumptions with a capital partner early. If it’s truly compelling, it won’t need a pitch deck. It’ll get a yes on a whiteboard. 4. Move quickly, but don’t skip control. The best deals aren’t available for long, but that doesn’t mean you should lose control of your terms or outcome. We’ve quietly stepped into over $45M of deal flow this way. Want to see how we’d look at your next opportunity? We’re a DM away.

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I met Craig Limoli, Founder and CEO of Wellsheet, in 2019. Craig was presenting at the Ai4 Healthcare Conference in New York City, hosted by Michael J Weiss . It was one of those early gatherings focused on AI in healthcare - well before the recent wave of hype. Craig took the stage to share how Wellsheet was using AI to help doctors and nurses make better, faster decisions at the point of care with its Care Team Copilot. Wellsheet’s technology was impressive, but its real edge came from Craig’s deep understanding of the problem he was solving. Before founding Wellsheet, he worked at IBM as a strategy consultant, helping large health systems assess their tech stacks. He saw firsthand that the tools available were clunky, fragmented, and ultimately failed to support the clinicians doing the hardest work. It’s a story as old as time - the very systems IBM was selling to hospitals weren’t meeting their actual needs. So, Craig left IBM, enrolled in the The Wharton School MBA program to sharpen his entrepreneurial skills, and decided to build the product those systems truly needed - a Care Team Copilot designed to summarize patient charts, streamline documentation, and support real-time collaboration between physicians and nurses. We stayed in touch after that first meeting, and a few months later, Wellsheet raised its $4.5 million Series A, which our team at SpringTide Ventures led. The round came together just as the world was shutting down in the early months of the pandemic. Understandably, Craig was nervous that investors might pull back as uncertainty swept through the market, but we didn’t. We believed in Wellsheet’s mission, and more importantly, in Craig’s ability to execute against it. Despite the chaos of 2020, he stayed focused and transparent - qualities that made us even more confident we were backing the right founder at the right time. Fast forward to today: Wellsheet is now live at hundreds of hospitals and continues to outperform much larger competitors. In fact, when a major national health system evaluated solutions from both Google and Wellsheet, they unanimously chose Wellsheet. The healthcare industry faces an unprecedented shortage of doctors, nurses, and frontline clinicians. Wellsheet’s technology helps address this challenge by automating the most time-consuming and manual parts of clinical work. For physicians, it means no more laborious data entry; for executives, it means decisions are queued up for them - clear, informed, and ready to act on. By streamlining chart reviews, documentation, and decision support, Wellsheet enables care teams to focus on what truly matters: delivering better patient outcomes. We’re proud to support, and keep championing founders like Craig and his mission-driven team at Wellsheet!

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