Startup investing was the name of the game at Milwaukee Startup Week on Friday.
In a morning Open Deal Screening Meeting, Golden Angels Investors heard pitches from two Wisconsin startups and shared their investing strategy with the audience.
Kenneth Iwinski of Wisconsin Rapids-based enhanced enteral nutrition company Synesis LLC and Sherry Zhang of Brookfield-based genomic nutrition firm GenoPalate Inc. presented their firms, their value proposition and their funding requests, and then members of Golden Angels talked about what they liked or didn’t like about each as an investment opportunity.
Synesis makes an enteral nutrition product – the daily nutrition delivered to people with swallowing disorders.
“80 percent of the products on the market is what we refer to as standard formulations,” Iwinski said.
The challenge with the standard formulations on the market is their makeup can lead to the degradation of the gut barrier function, he said. This can lead to diarrhea, cramping and infection, and affects about 35 percent of patients using the products.
“It’s not a well-understood problem,” he said. “It’s generally recognized as a common problem.”
Synesis has created a formulation, called Phytality,that includes tannins that help prevent the gut barrier degradation. Read the full story here.
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