INVESTING IN BREAKTHROUGH TECHNOLOGIES Echo Investment Capital founding partner Christian Kanady sees OKC as a future global leader in biomanufacturing Editor’s note: Christian Kanady is an entrepreneur and investor with almost 20 years of experience deploying over $1.2 billion in capital across industries. He is the founding partner of Echo Investment Capital, a multi-disciplinary investment firm that is funding innovation in energy, media, life sciences, real estate, national security, and healthcare. An Oklahoma City native, Kanady believes in the unique advantages of marrying overlooked Midwestern assets with world-class talent and sophisticated capital to deliver returns for both investors and communities. Kanady founded Echo Energy in 2010 and built it over a decade into one of the top five largest privately held mineral owners in the United States. He took the time to answer our questions about Echo Investment Capital and its investment philosophy:
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CHRISTIAN KANADY
WHAT PROMPTED YOU TO CREATE THIS INVESTMENT COMPANY IN OKC AND WHERE ARE YOU SEEKING LIFE SCIENCES CANDIDATES FOR INVESTMENT? Having grown up here, I’ve always known that Oklahoma City was a beautiful city full of innovative, hard-working people — a city that had been under-appreciated for far too long. In recent years, OKC has been on quite an upward trajectory, and we wanted to harness that spirit and reinvest in opportunities right here at home. Oklahoma City is known as a power player in the oil and gas industry because we are both a community of pioneers and we are also extremely resourceful and naturally optimize for the best use of our assets. This is a perfect combination for a biomanufacturing hub since it marries breakthrough technology with processdriven iteration. We think OKC could be a global leader in this space.
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WHAT TYPE OF BIOTECH OR LIFE SCIENCE VENTURES DOES ECHO TARGET FOR INVESTMENTS? Echo will invest in early-stage companies, and typically we find these companies in Boston, San Francisco, New York and other top-decile research centers on the coasts. We are interested in therapeutics, diagnostics, devices, and healthcare tech. We look for companies with a breakthrough technology and a world-class team and then help these companies by connecting them with the bio-infrastructure Echo is creating in OKC. Our goal is to deliver this infrastructure to our portfolio companies in a way that removes their manufacturing pinch points while also lowering development and commercial costs. We believe this not only provides a competitive advantage to our companies that helps de-risk their business model, but also differentiates Echo as a premier investment partner in an otherwise crowded life sciences national marketplace.
