boltKey Takeaways
- Funding to GMP in 18 months. White Raven closed its funding in June 2023 and had its manufacturing site certified for clinical GMP in roughly 18 months. Dimitri says the site has now been through the inspection for its commercial GMP certification.
- A gap for small, flexible fill-finish. Dimitri always wanted to build a company, and at one point thought he would have to leave pharma to do it. Seeing the need for a small, flexible aseptic filling CDMO gave him a reason to start one inside the industry.
- Paperless from day one. One of the three co-founders is an IT engineer and developer, an unusual profile for a CDMO founding team. Dimitri sees digitalization as the key to moving fast and staying flexible in an industry he says is late to it.
- Hire for mindset, train for skills. Hard skills can be taught relatively easily, but fit for a startup environment cannot. White Raven looks for people who take ownership, cope without settled structures and sometimes define their own work.
- Define the role before you hire. In a new organization, roles don't exist yet. Dimitri has seen a recruitment process show halfway through that the job description no longer matched the need, which left a choice between the current pipeline and starting over.
- Grow without burning the company. Demand is unpredictable, so growing too fast or accepting too many projects is a real risk. His best career advice: a leader's job is to make themselves as useless as possible, with a team that can run without them.
Written by
Charlie Bexon
Senior Group Business Manager · Metric BIO
Global CRDMO recruiter and APAC expert.
