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Beckley Psytech Series-A

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Beckley Psytech Pitch Deck to Raise $18.6m Series-A Round

This is the Beckley Psytech pitch deck to raise a $18.6m series-a round in 2020.

About

Beckley Psytech operates as a psychedelic medicine company. Beckley Psytech is developing a drug pipeline of psychedelic medicines which it says have significant commercial potential to address this unmet clinical need.

Cosmo Feilding Mellen was involved in the world of psychedelics long before the compounds started to become mainstream.

Feilding Mellen is the co-founder and CEO of UK-based psychedelics company Beckley Psytech, but his family — and his mother Amanda Feilding, in particular — has been involved in the scientific studies around psychedelics since 1998. That’s the year Feilding started the Beckley Foundation, a non-profit focused on drug policy reform and scientific research into psychoactive substances.

Feilding dubbed the Countess of Cannabis, has been a long-time advocate for psychedelics-based therapies and is a leading advocate for reform for medical cannabis in Europe. She is currently chair of Beckley Psytech’s Scientific Advisory Board.

Before starting Beckley Psytech, Feilding Mellen was deeply involved in the Beckley Foundation, which has partnered in joint research collaborations with institutions like Imperial College London and Johns Hopkins in clinical trials of psychedelic compounds over the past 20 years.

He’s directed documentaries on drug policy and the history of psychedelics and worked as the managing director of the UK for Canopy Growth, a Canadian cannabis giant. During that time, Canopy acquired Beckley Canopy Therapeutics, a company founded in partnership with Canopy Growth and the Beckley Foundation to develop cannabis-based medications.

Beckley Psytech was formed in 2019 when the non-profit foundation began to look for business opportunities that would be able to increase the scale and ambition of the work the foundation was involved in. The foundation exists separately from the for-profit company.

The for-profit venture just closed an $18.6 million funding round, backed by investment firms Noetic Psychedelic Fund and Bail Capital. Canadian businessman Greg Bailey, entrepreneur Jim Mellon, and Innocent Drinks co-founder Richard Reed also invested in this round, as well as a previous $3.8 million fund which closed in May 2020.

Beckley Psytech plans to soon begin clinical trials of 5-MeO-DMT, a psychedelic agent found naturally in the Sonoran Desert toad. Feilding Mellen said that the company is looking into other treatments as well.

Cosmo Feilding Mellen, director and CEO of Beckley Psytech

“We’re setting up Beckley Psytech to be a platform where multiple drug development programs are running in parallel with different compounds, targeting different disease areas,” he said in an interview.

Beckley Psytech plans to look into three groups of compounds.

The first will focus on psychedelics that are “well defined” and researched already, like LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA, he said.

The second generation of products will be those that have a large body of anecdotal evidence but haven’t been researched very much. That includes the Southern Desert Toad psychedelic agent 5-MeO-DMT.

The third generation will be focused on unique compounds that Beckley hopes to develop and patent. These synthetic compounds would offer “clinical and safety advantages over what’s already out there,” Feilding Mellen said.

He said the company aims to have approved psychedelic medications come on the market by 2025, if not before. ATAI Life Sciences and Compass Pathways, two of the biggest psychedelics companies, have offered similar timelines.

Funding rounds

Announced Date	Transaction Name	Number of Investors	Money Raised	Lead Investors
Aug 15, 2021	Series B – Beckley Psytech	10	£58M	Integrated
May 1, 2021	Series B – Beckley Psytech	2	—	—
Dec 23, 2020	Venture Round – Beckley Psytech	5	£14M	—
Oct 31, 2020	Series A – Beckley Psytech	1	—	—
Jun 30, 2020	Series A – Beckley Psytech	6	£12M	—

Pitch Deck Review Summary

Structured Summary Review

This is not a good deck. I have no doubt that the chaps are science nerds, but they don’t know how to write a deck (according to the gospel of me).

Words

Word use is a bit dubious in this deck.

Slide length

There are 22 slides but a lot of them are pointless interstitial slides so the length is not representative.

Headers

They have headers but they are not being used properly. Use headers to tell a story and make the point that the body of content will prove.

Appearance

They clearly used a designer, but not one that thinks about communication.

I do not use anything other than light grey as a background colour. I abhor dark backgrounds for various reasons, the main ones being contrast and legibility. There’s also the whole thing about the amount of toner wasted if the deck is printed.

Narrative

They have seemingly blindly followed a checklist structure. The slides are sort of in the correct order, but given the headers, it’s not at all easy to see the point.

Structure

The designer has done the basics of aligning and whatnot. I don’t really like some of the format choices to represent information though, mainly because I don’t like the content.

Slides

I have zero comprehension of the business opportunity. They have not been specific with regard to their specific market opportunity, how they make money, who their competition is, who their customers are (forget about how they acquire them) etc.

Slide by Slide Review

Don’t write an investor presentation, that’s the point of the deck.

Just add a tagline so investors know what they are getting in the deck. Is it a biotech startup?

Do not bother adding a disclaimer slide. No one cares.

Quotes are lame as balls. Do not add them.

Mission slides are always total bollox. The only times I’ve ever seen good ones are when they explain what they are solving. E.g. Google: structures the world’s information and makes it searchable. I mean that makes sense right and is a lofty goal.

I guess this slide basically says “We make drugs for crazy people” (Yes, that is the dick head explanation) but it just doesn’t hit like the Google mission.

The header is not good. Whilst the content may be fair, the slide is terribly boring to look at.

This sort of looks like a summary slide. I generally don’t like these. I prefer to cover topics as you need to. If they are important, they deserve individual attention.

Don’t write things like “the Beckley advantage”. It’s of no value and takes up really important real estate.

This is a weird slide, it’s like I know who Beckley is. Maybe niche investors know, but I don’t. Sure, the content is impressive, but there’s no intro to them for me to get this.

Don’t use interstitial slides.

Don’t bother adding “the problem”. It should be obvious if you are talking about the problem as the title should allude to it. I believe the issue is founders all check the checklist of slides they need to use and for some reason believe they need to add the title from the checklist.

The slide is solid for a quick go at making a slide, but eh.

So $6t will be the cost of treating mental illness in 2030, but how is this solved now? I’d like to know what kinds of problems are being solved, who pays (insurance, gov?), are things being solved adequately?

If resistance is a key point, why don’t they dig into it and explain it? These are key decisions you need to decide to make when writing your deck.

“Proving” says to me “It doesn’t work yet”. My presumption is this has to be a play on a reg change, or they are figuring out how to make effective compounds still. Either way alarm of risk factor pops in my head.

The deck isn’t very accessible. I’m sort of figuring out what’s going on as I am forced to read it. Is the point “two drugs have been FDA approved so far”?

Again, there is the basis for an ok slide here, but it’s a bit of work to follow as it is. The point they want to focus on is the ‘ongoing’ part, but so what?

I don’t like dark backgrounds. It messes up the contrast. The dark green on black is harsh.

You can’t claim macroeconomic drivers without even mentioning them. Just chucking in some quotes does not do the job.

The Wired bottom middle one is just added to give the founder an ego boost. She is not a macro driver…

Delete.

Can you tell me the takeaway from this slide in 5 seconds? No, you have to read everything. The only quick thing to read is that there are 3 generations…

You need to make your deck really easy for investors to read and quickly. As a founder, you can’t just superficially look at a slide and think it looks fine. You need to do the hard work of considering if the content does its job.

There are far more people on this slide than are needed.

Investors care about the founders as they are the ones that they are investing in. I want bullets on each person, ideally 3 short ones with impressive things.

A name, title and logo are not adequate.

The ideal is 3 people per slide and 5 is the absolute max (It doesn’t look good).

They stick in and look at our website for details. Do you fricking think I have nothing better to do than go to your website and do research before I am interested. I assure you I will not do so till I want to dig into the company.