Why We Invested in Resilient Lifescience — Preventing Opioid Overdose

Excited to announce our investment in Resilient Lifescience, which is taking on the opioid epidemic by developing a wearable system to detect and automatically reverse overdoses. Tau Ventures is an AI-first fund in Silicon Valley investing primarily in seed and we occasionally take earlier or later bets when we see immense promise. We are also investing in US / Canada but in exceptional cases will consider a deal outside. Resilient was founded in 2022 in Pittsburgh and impressed us with (1) a strong need, (2) building an execution-focused team, and (3) their business strategy.

1) The Need

The opioid crisis is truly a tragedy that costs $1T per year, touching all the 5Ps (payors, providers, patients, pharma, policymakers). Specifically, there are now over 75,000 opioid overdose deaths per year in the US, and the majority of them occur when nobody is around to administer aid (CDC, rand.org). We are especially familiar with this space given our investment in Marigold Health.

2) The Team

We thought the cofounder’s backgrounds speak for themselves: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradfordholden and https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlierproctor. CEO Brad was a Marine for 4 years including being a Platoon Commander in Afghanistan. CTO Charlie was an engineer at Google. They met at Infinitus, another Tau portfolio company, and their CEO invested personally and is the one who introed us.

3) Business Strategy

Hardware is hard, as the bar for getting everything right is much higher than in software, even more so in healthcare. Manufacturing and distribution costs also create a very different cost structure than software ventures. We see a pathway for them to gather more data and strengthen the analytics / AI piece of the product. We appreciate the CEO’s plan to do customer discovery and subvert the general archetype of medical devices being capital intensive. We also subscribe to their thesis that being in Pittsburgh will keep costs low and allow them access to great talent, especially in engineering from Carnegie Mellon.

We are honored and excited to be part of Resilient’s journey, using technology to solve a big problem. More at https://www.resilient.bio.

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Originally published on “Data Driven Investor,” am happy to syndicate on other platforms. I am the Managing Partner and Cofounder of Tau Ventures with 20 years in Silicon Valley across corporates, own startup, and VC funds. These are purposely short articles focused on practical insights (I call it gl;dr — good length; did read). Many of my writings are at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amgarg/detail/recent-activity/posts and I would be stoked if they get people interested enough in a topic to explore in further depth. If this article had useful insights for you comment away and/or give a like on the article and on the Tau Ventures’ LinkedIn page, with due thanks for supporting our work. All opinions expressed here are my own.