Investment Questions
The right diligence question is the one that can change the decision.
Diligence should not maximize the amount of analysis. It should reduce uncertainty around the assumptions that determine value. SVI scopes the work around the investment decision, the asset or business, and the evidence required to support or challenge the thesis.
Does the evidence support the asset's value?
For biopharma investments, an attractive scientific narrative is not the same as a supported investment thesis. The work examines whether the evidence behind the asset actually supports the value being ascribed to it — and what remains conditional.
Decision implication
What is supported today, what remains conditional, and what should not yet be included in the valuation.
Is the commercial opportunity actually underwritable?
Large theoretical markets are easy to describe. Investable markets are constrained by real patients, real customers, access, competition, workflow, adoption, economics, and the ability to execute. SVI evaluates whether the assumptions embedded in the commercial case are consistent with those realities.
Decision implication
Which portions of the revenue case are supportable, which require more conservative assumptions, and where upside is genuinely incremental.
Will pricing, access, and reimbursement support adoption?
Clinical value does not automatically become commercial value. The structure of access, reimbursement, and payer behavior — and the decisions that shape how a product actually gets used — can materially change whether the forecast is achievable.
Decision implication
Whether access supports the forecast, delays it, limits it, or requires a different commercialization strategy.
Can manufacturing and supply support the forecast?
This is particularly important in radiopharmaceuticals and other complex therapeutic categories, where the investment case can depend as much on manufacturing, supply, and distribution reliability as on clinical performance.
Decision implication
Whether the assumed growth can be delivered operationally, and what constraints could limit revenue or increase capital requirements.
What could break the thesis?
Every attractive investment case has failure modes. The useful question is not whether risk exists. It is whether a specific risk can materially change value, timing, capital requirements, or probability of success.
Decision implication
Which risks should be accepted, resolved, priced, structured around, or treated as a reason to stop.
Which assumptions are carrying the valuation?
Not every question deserves equal attention. A small number of assumptions typically account for most of the difference between the base case and the downside case.
Decision implication
Where additional evidence is worth the time and where the model should remain conservative.
Where does value come from after the investment?
Closing a transaction does not create the value assumed in the investment case. For operating businesses, value depends on execution against the plan; for development-stage companies, it depends on the milestones and decisions that follow. Either way, the operating priorities that matter most are usually a short list, not a long one.
Decision implication
The few operating priorities and milestones that matter most to value creation.
The deliverable follows the decision.
The appropriate output may be concise or extensive. What matters is that the work resolves the decision, makes uncertainty visible, and gives the investment team a defensible basis for action.