Canaan Partners Technology & Healthcare Focus

Focus

Technology

Healthcare

Global

We are seasoned investment professionals with deep domain expertise, extensive relationships with the world’s leading companies and entrepreneurs, and a solid track record of building valuable technology and healthcare companies that are uniquely meaningful to society. Our firm focuses on:

Technology
Digital Media
Comm + Mobility
Enterprise
Clean Tech

Healthcare
Biopharmaceuticals
Medical Devices
Diagnostics

Technology

Digital Media
2006 marked a tipping point in online content consumption as audiences turned more often to the internet for entertainment. Digital media is defining a new era of content creation and consumption. Canaan’s focus on digital media includes investments in next-generation advertising technologies, online content communities, and networking and communications infrastructure.

Communications & Mobility
Smart phones may be getting smarter and phone calls cheaper, but we’re still a long way from communications nirvana where voice and data are seamless, ubiquitous and inexpensive across carriers, regions and countries. In other words, the world is still waiting for an easy-to-use handheld device that can broadcast live video in San Francisco and Seoul and deliver crystal clear calls in Nebraska and New York, at the push of a button for just a few pennies. Canaan recognizes the immense opportunity in bringing innovation to the communications infrastructure and mobility sectors. We’re looking for technologies that will make voice, video and data communications reliable, inexpensive, fast and global.

Enterprise
Companies are suffering from information overload. Staying on top of the explosion of unstructured data; from Website copy and podcasts to user-generated video as well as ever-escalating terabytes of corporate data poses one of the biggest business challenges today. Canaan invests in enterprise software and services that allow companies to harness the power of emerging Web-based technologies to work better, faster and smarter. We are looking for software and services that leverage technologies like open source, AJAX and SOA to seamlessly integrate multiple and disparate enterprise systems to build business-critical infrastructures. The next generation of enterprise software will allow companies to make better business decisions, boost employee productivity and increase profits more than ever before.

Clean Tech
The last few years have seen a surge in investment in “cleantech” businesses. At Canaan, we’ve been backing “cleantech” companies before the term even existed; our first investment into the sector was in Transphase Systems, a maker of large-scale energy storage systems, in 1991. Those early forays into cleantech taught us a lot – especially how challenging it can be to identify, build and grow an alternative energy company. But something has changed today: alternative energy has gone from an experimental industry to an economic necessity. Canaan is committed to investing in the next-generation of cleantech leaders that will solve the growing problems in the energy industry. We are pursuing early and mid-stage investments in technology-driven companies in sectors such as energy efficiency; energy storage; waste disposal and carbon recapture; alternative power generation; carbon sequestration and ‘clean coal’; and water purification. And we’re pursuing those investments worldwide, because solving the looming energy crisis is a global problem.

Healthcare

Biopharmaceuticals
Canaan invests in high-growth pharmaceutical companies developing new therapeutics that will alter the drug marketplace and help improve and save lives. We are looking to invest in companies developing innovative treatments for infectious diseases, oncology and the central nervous system. These companies leverage deep knowledge, extensive patents and leading biotech research to bring the most effective, sophisticated drugs to market. Our expertise in clinical development, formulation, regulatory affairs and business development helps drive value creation and long-lasting market success for tomorrow’s leading biopharmaceutical companies.

Medical Devices
Our medical device investment strategy is to focus on significant unmet medical needs in a variety of disease categories or therapeutic indications, including: cardiovascular disease, central nervous system diseases and aesthetic medicine. Our strong operational expertise in product development, commercialization, and strategy allows us to be a strong growth partner for early-stage medical device companies.

Diagnostics
To effectively treat the world’s most intractable diseases, first doctors must arrive at a correct diagnosis. At Canaan, we invest in cutting-edge diagnostic technologies that help medical professionals better pinpoint risk factors, symptoms and diseases – to better save lives. We’re interested in technologies such as implantable sensors that regulate therapeutic delivery, new techniques for developing personalized medicines and devices that monitor and identify various life-threatening diseases, including cancer, asthma and diabetes.