The Scientific Breakthroughs Driving Results for Patients

With Charlie Finnie from Awareness Capital

TRANSCRIPT

CMHI: Okay, so I am here with Charlie Finnie from Awareness Capital. Charlie, tell us a little bit about Awareness Capital.

Charlie Finnie: So Awareness Capital is a venture capital fund that invests in, innovation companies pertaining to mental health and brain health. And we don't define it too much more narrowly than that, because sometimes the best ideas come from the most unexpected places.

CMHI: Fantastic. And you are predominantly looking to come in at growth stage. Is that correct?

Charlie Finnie: Yes. The it's hard to generalize about this because we're pretty opportunistic. If we see a fantastic idea, we don't really care about the stage, frankly. But generally we avoid startups because A there's too much risk. B it takes too long and we're in a hurry here. We want to not only deliver financial returns relatively quickly. To prove that you can make money investing in mental health companies. But we also, frankly, want to bring positive impact to patients sooner than later.

CMHI: And you're integrated within the One Mind ecosystem, perhaps to say a little bit about that.

Charlie Finnie: So One mind is arguably the most respected and one of the oldest mental health nonprofits in the United States. They've been around for 30 years. They raised almost $1 billion on a nonprofit business, which means they give it all away after raising it in the form mostly of grants, mostly research grants. But all focused on mental health. So they are a giant in the field and terrifically well-connected with the best scientists and psychologists and psychiatrists globally in this field.

CMHI: And looking at the mental health space at the moment, obviously many different aspects that people can invest into. What are the areas of mental health that you think are particularly enticing, investable right now?

Charlie Finnie: So it's a great question. It's changed a lot, over the past five years. But as recently as five years ago, there was not a lot to invest in. Frankly, I probably would not have done it, done this fund five years ago. But since then, there's been literally an explosion of research breakthroughs that have escaped the laboratory. Finally, after decades of percolation and have been commercialized into companies in as many a wide range of fields, ranging from psychedelics to, AI and data analytics, to better understanding of the brain gut connection, better understanding of the human genome. And so and speech recognition is a big deal and so on and so forth. It's a wide range of breakthroughs that are delivering powerful results for patients.

CMHI: And typically, what sort of return are you looking for over how long? How many years?

Charlie Finnie: Our goal is to deliver financial returns that are in line with the top venture capital firms globally. So so a top tier venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, which is why I used to work so I, I know enough to be dangerous, delivers typically there over a long period of time 30% a year, average annual returns. And, it's hard, you know, it's hard for any other asset class to match that. But, I mean, it just shows you that there's a there's an opportunity when you're investing in small, privately held companies, there's the opportunity to make massive capital gains. So we don't have to get every investment right. But if we get a few of them right and they go up 10 or 20 times in value, then we can deliver those 30% annual returns without that breathing too hard. Frankly. And that's happening already.

CMHI: Can you tell us a little bit about a success story, something that you've invested in that you can see?

Charlie Finnie: We've made ten investments in the we've been around for two years investing and ten of our of our ten investments, five have been marked up in value dramatically. One of those was I'll just give you a quick example, a speech recognition AI company, which, this is a group of engineers who labored for a couple of decades at Microsoft and Amazon developing those companies speech recognition capabilities. But they got very interested in mental health. And now they have a an offering that is focused on mental health and can listen, basically listen to a patient talk for about two minutes when they come into a clinic or an emergency room. And the software can tell from analyzing their speech, whether they are at near term risk for a mental health episode or breakdown that saves clinicians literally hours per patient and many thousands of dollars every day. If you think about it, a crowded emergency room at a major urban hospital. Sometimes they have to interview these people for hours to figure out what their psychological state of mind is. And, and, that's, you know, there are not enough clinicians and nurses to do that. And so if you have if you can let technology help you figure that out, that problem out in literally minutes instead of hours, that's changing the world already. And so these are all innovations that are making the difference right now.

CMHI: Is there an area of mental health innovation that you are keeping your eye on, that you think is coming to fruition in perhaps a five year period?

Charlie Finnie: Well, I know that a lot of people like to talk about AI, but I, I have to say, as somebody who's old enough to remember the dawn of the internet and what's involved with the dawn of the internet, I have to say that some once in a while in my in my case, about once every 20 or 30 years, something comes along that really is going to change the world. And, we have already some investments in AI companies that are going to radically improve the lives of patients. Just a quick example. we have an investment in a company called hemispheric that the scientists, the engineers actually invented the facial recognition software on the front of your iPhone. If you use an iPhone now, they're applying their talents to doing a mapping and detailed mapping of every individual brain on the planet. But like like a snowflake, each brain is unique. And they can do such a detailed mapping that the big pharmaceutical companies believe that they can deliver much more precise and effective drugs at one tenth the cost in one tenth the time. And that's the power of AI.

CMHI: That's an incredible example, and it makes me think so. Last question for those coming into mental health as an looking at it as an investment, it can feel quite overwhelming to start off with just because it's a complex issue. There's so many different facets of it. So and conscious also that people are now coming to mental health from lots of different sectors, which is brilliant because it affects us all and it cuts across everything. Perhaps just your top tip for someone coming into mental health investing for the first time.

Charlie Finnie: Yeah well it you're right it everyone has a story in their family about about mental health. No one goes untouched by it so everyone can relate to it. The tricky part is that it it's very complicated. The brain is the most complicated organ in the body and in the US. We like to say it's the second most complicated thing on the planet after the US health care system. But the point is that in order to invest in it successfully, you need full time professional expertise that shouldn't come as a surprise. It so much expertise is required that we at Awareness Capital, we have both the investment expertise and the domain knowledge of the subject matter. But we don't. We don't stop there. We have a whole scientific advisory team of the top brain scientists. And that's through the relationship with One Mind, the nonprofit that I mentioned. But the point is it it's highly technical. It's very complicated. it's not easy. And so you need to surround yourself with very smart people. And I've been lucky enough to surround myself with a lot of people who are a lot smarter than I am.

CMHI: Thank you, Charlie. Thank you very, very much. Okay.