Spinal injuries and other problems can be devastating, and for a range of reasons. A serial entrepreneur talks about venture philanthropy and its application to specific problems, all the while taking a hard-headed approach to investment returns.

A technology entrepreneur whose family experience with spinal cord injury is taking the field of venture philanthropy to a new level, is tapping into the desire of high net worth individuals to make changes happen as quickly as possible. 

Adrien Cohen (pictured below), the founding managing director of SCI Ventures, a new venture philanthropy fund, has the kind of experience “blend” – technology, emerging markets and now philanthropy – that reflects the way in which the wealth sector today is evolving. And he’s a man with a mission: investing in treatments and technologies that can fix spinal cord injuries and paralysis.

Adrien Cohen

SCI Ventures, founded in 2023, is targeting a $40 million first-round fundraise to support stakes in up to 20 companies; it has already raised $30 million. The organisation has backers from foundations and those in scientific research in the UK, other parts of Europe – such as Scandinavia – and the US. At present, SCI’s vehicle is being seeded to get it established.

“Venture philanthropy is like a traditional venture capital fund. We take an equity position and companies must be considered sound and have a path to market,” Cohen told this publication in a recent interview. Money made from successful exits out of investments is ploughed back into new opportunities. This is an “evergreen” model, Cohen continued. Financial returns are important, and returns shape the discipline of the fund.

So far, since its launch in January 2024, the fund has taken stakes in four companies; Cohen said that SCI intends to reach a figure of 20 companies in the next three years.

The challenge
About 15 million people around the world have some form of spinal cord paralysis, a devastating situation for those who lack care and resources, as well as, to put it in more mercenary terms, a big cost to public health services and the wider economy. 

But Cohen thinks that harnessing investment resources and funnelling these into startups and specific scientific applied research can open the potential to resolve some of these problems. Harnessing investment expertise to achieve results – usually thought of as charity – is very much what venture philanthropy is about.

When Cohen started to look at the issue in 2021 after his brother Fabrice suffered an injury that paralysed him from the waist down, he could not see much connection between research into potential treatments, and real-world applications. 

SCI Ventures does not just focus on paralysis, but other kinds of neurological disorders, Cohen said: “We look for near-term functional improvement in human movement, bladder and bowel functions, sexual functions and other crucial functions that have been lost. That is usually a technological solution that we can bring to market in the next five years. Longer term, within the next 10 years, our goal is to repair the spinal cord through biological approaches."

Cohen said one portfolio firm is Onward Medical, a Switzerland-listed business, which has developed an epidural stimulation method to get people walking again via a spine-brain link. The medical technology firm raised €20 million ($22.2 million) in March 2024. A second firm that Cohen mentions – based in Boston, US – is Augmental Technologies, which concentrates on hands-free controls of digital technology using the tongue as a mouse – a form of non-invasive brain-computer interface.

SCI Ventures has prominent backers, such as the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation and Wings for Life. It is also funded by HNW donors and family offices. Some of those who support the fund also have access to co-investment opportunities in a more straightforward commercial way in the portfolio companies, Cohen said.

This news service spoke to Cohen while the 2024 Paralympics were under way in Paris, a demonstration of how people overcome adversity to compete and excel in a range of athletic and sports disciplines. This is the sort of mindset that Cohen admires, and which drives him and his colleagues forward. And there is a wider array of medical conditions that the venture philanthropy model can focus on. 

“People see these treatments and it gives them back hope,” he said. 

(In a parallel vein, see this opinion article from the editor about the role of philanthropic advice and trends in the wider philanthropic space.)