Venture Capital roundtable.

• Author: Malan, Mekenna
• Position: ROUNDTABLE

This month, Utah Business partnered with Dentons Durham Jones Pinegar to host a roundtable event featuring Utah's venture capital leaders. Moderated by Cydni Tetro of Brandless, Inc., they discussed raising capital, emerging industries, emphasizing diversity, and more. Here are a few highlights from the event.

We've had a bull market for the last number of years. What does that mean as we head into 2022? Which industries should we be watching?

Jeremy Neilson I Co-founder and CEO I Assure

The blockchain space. We did see crypto and blockchain tank a couple years ago, but it came back pretty big in 2021. And with NFTs, the blockchain, and crypto, it's back in a big way. I think you're going to see that next wave--almost like the ".com"--it got big and frothy and it tanked. Then people figured it out and much more stable and thought-through businesses and ideas came out.

Nate McBride I Partner and CFO | Tamarak Capital

I don't know if it's a "canary in a coal mine" thing, but we're seeing a lot of life sciences companies emerge--all related to previous federal dollars that went into COVID response. So they were flush with that cash, and now they're looking for additional investment capital. We're also seeing lot of AI in relation to workplace automation. Workplace replacement--that's the next big thing. And it's also, in a sense, COVID-related. You see the workforce right now and the difficulty people are having with staffing, so you're seeing companies say, "Well, If that's going to be the future, we better accelerate our ability to replace that workforce through AI."

Jack Boren | Managing Director | EPIC Ventures

If you look at 2020 versus 2021, we saw 2x increase in US-based venture capital investment in the healthcare sector. That's pretty broadly defined, but we went from $14-something billion to, I think, close to $30 in 2021. A lot of investors got really excited about the positive regulatory tailwinds in the healthcare ecosystem and pumped capital in, and really inflated valuations and started tackling traditional healthcare channels. I think, here, sales cycles are super long. They're slow to adopt, very slow to change, and very averse to change. Business models will have to pivot to really service higher-velocity opportunities in the healthcare market.

Capital doesn't go to consumer here. If you want to raise money as a consumer company, you don't do it in state. What does it mean if we have these emerging industries and capital...