AIM-HI was born when Dr. Sujuan Ba, Franklin Salisbury, and Charlie Weatherspoon – realized a major obstacle to their vision for the National Foundation for Cancer Research:

Therapeutic development in pre-clinical stage is both an expensive and risky investment, which is enough to scare away most traditional VCs. Dr. Ba, Mr. Salisbury and Mr. Weatherspoon co-founded AIM-HI in 2019 with the commitment to bridging this “Valley of Death” and providing the support that these entrepreneurs and researchers need.

With the initial grants from NFCR, AIM-HI has since invested in nineteen promising start-ups, fourteen of these companies have since received additional investments from other investors and one company secured a commercial licensing from a large medical device company.

We have also identified another barrier in therapeutic development: women scientist-entrepreneurs were grossly underfunded comparing to their male counterparts. From this realization, the Women’s Venture Competition was born, the first of its kind to specifically support female entrepreneurs in the oncology arena because we believe it is important to have women’s perspective in developing cancer therapeutics when women are equally affected by cancer as men.