From Preprint to Funding: How Publishing on bioRxiv Can Accelerate Investment in Your Biotech Venture

There is a moment in the life of almost every biotech research project when the science is ready — the data is solid, the results are significant, the team knows what they have found — but the formal peer review process will take six months to a year to confirm it publicly. During that window, competitors may publish adjacent work. Priority may be lost. And investors or grant committees evaluating the opportunity have nothing citable to point to when assessing the claim.

This is precisely the problem that bioRxiv was designed to solve. And in the decade since its founding, it has done so with consequences for both scientific communication and research funding that are larger and more concrete than most researchers in the EU and Israel have yet fully absorbed.

What bioRxiv Is — and What It Is Not

bioRxiv is a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences, operated by openRxiv, a non-profit organisation. Founded by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2013, it allows authors to make their findings immediately available to the scientific community and receive feedback on draft manuscripts before they are submitted to journals.

The critical distinction is that bioRxiv preprints are not peer-reviewed. They undergo a basic screening process — plagiarism checks, appropriateness assessment, safeguarding checks — but they are explicitly pre-publication documents. Preprints deposited in bioRxiv can be cited using their digital object identifier (DOI), which gives them a formal, stable, timestamped identity in the scientific record, even before any journal has accepted the underlying paper.

This combination — citable but not peer-reviewed, immediate but not definitive — is precisely what makes the preprint strategically interesting for researchers navigating the intersection of scientific communication and commercial funding. It is also what makes it necessary to understand its limitations clearly before building a funding strategy around it.

The Evidence on Preprint Impact

The question of whether posting a preprint on bioRxiv actually changes anything — beyond making the work available earlier — has been studied with increasing rigour over the past several years, and the findings are consistently positive.

A systematic study assessing the citation and altmetric advantage of bioRxiv retrieved metadata from all preprints deposited between November 2013 and December 2017 and matched them to articles subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals. The analysis found that bioRxiv-deposited journal articles had sizably higher citation and altmetric counts compared to non-deposited articles, and regression analysis confirmed that this advantage was not explained by publication venue, authorship characteristics, or other confounding variables.

In plain terms: papers that were posted as preprints before peer-reviewed publication were subsequently cited more than equivalent papers that were not. The mechanism is straightforward — earlier availability means earlier reading, earlier citation, and earlier integration into the scientific conversation that determines which results become foundational and which become footnotes.

For a biotech founder or researcher preparing to approach investors or grant committees, the implications are direct. The altmetric signal — the measurable online engagement with a result, including downloads, shares, citations, and media coverage — is itself a form of evidence that an investor or evaluator can examine. A preprint with 5,000 downloads and 50 citations in the community it was designed to reach is not peer-reviewed, but it is evidence of genuine scientific interest that no amount of persuasive narrative in a pitch deck can replicate.

Why This Matters in the 2025 Funding Environment

Biotech venture capital entered a period of recalibration in 2025. After a strong 2024, when biotech VC surpassed pre-pandemic levels with early venture rounds reaching $15.5 billion, the environment became more challenging as macroeconomic headwinds, NIH funding cuts, and regulatory uncertainty weighed on sentiment. Venture financing deal value jumped 70.9% from Q2 to Q3 2025 in recovery, with roughly 60% of all biotech VC funding announced in the second half of the year.

The pattern that emerged from this volatility is one that directly affects how preprints function as funding tools: venture capital is increasingly funnelled into late-stage programmes with clear commercialisation potential, leaving preclinical innovators competing for shrinking resources. In this environment, the early-stage biotech founder is not merely competing for capital — they are competing for attention from investors who are conducting more selective diligence and requiring more substantive evidence of scientific credibility before taking a first meeting.

Evidence from 2020 to 2025 suggests that the science which successfully attracted capital shared three common attributes: a defensible biological hypothesis, a demonstrable path to human studies, and a credible manufacturing or commercialisation route. A bioRxiv preprint, properly positioned, contributes directly to the first of these attributes — making the biological hypothesis visible, citable, and subject to community scrutiny before peer review has formally validated it. For the investor or grant evaluator who wants to understand whether the science is serious, a well-structured preprint with substantive community engagement is considerably more useful than a description of unpublished data.

The EU and Israeli Grant Landscape: Where Preprints Matter Most

For researchers in Europe and Israel, the funding landscape that makes preprints most strategically valuable is the one that sits between peer review and private capital: the non-dilutive public grant ecosystem.

The EIC Accelerator, operating under Horizon Europe, offers funding to startups and SMEs with innovative, game-changing products that could create new markets or disrupt existing ones, providing grants up to €2.5 million alongside optional equity investment of up to €10 million, specifically designed to fill the gap for high-risk innovation before companies can be fully financed by other investments.

The EIC Accelerator is extremely competitive, with success rates below 3% in 2025 — fewer than one in thirty applicants winning. At that selection threshold, what distinguishes a successful from an unsuccessful application is not primarily the novelty of the idea — all shortlisted applications are scientifically credible. It is the quality of the evidence assembled to demonstrate that the science is real, the team is capable, and the opportunity is properly understood. A bioRxiv preprint with documented community engagement, ongoing journal review, and preliminary external validation does real work in this application environment. It is not a substitute for peer-reviewed publication, but it is evidence that the work has been subjected to community scrutiny — and community scrutiny, in a competitive grant process, is a meaningful signal.

Israel ranked third among EIC Accelerator grant recipients in the 2024 cycle, behind only Germany and France, with nine Israeli startups securing €130 million in total funding. Several of those companies were in biotech and medtech, and the Israeli innovation ecosystem — supported by the Israel Innovation Authority's grant programmes, the BIRD Foundation's bilateral research agreements, and robust VC networks — has developed a sophisticated approach to sequencing public and private funding.

How to Use bioRxiv Strategically: A Practical Approach

Posting to bioRxiv is not a strategy on its own. It is a tool within a publication and communication strategy, and its effectiveness depends almost entirely on how it is deployed.

1. Time the posting to your funding cycle, not your manuscript readiness

   The optimal time to post a preprint is when the manuscript is substantively complete and you have a specific funding conversation approaching — a grant deadline, an investor meeting, or a partnership discussion. A preprint posted six months before any funding conversation is useful for citation building. A preprint posted two weeks before a pitch meeting is useful for due diligence. Both are valid, but they serve different purposes.

2. Write the abstract for two audiences simultaneously

   The abstract of a bioRxiv preprint is read by scientists and by non-scientists who encounter it in media coverage, social sharing, or investor research. A single abstract can serve both audiences if it opens with the clinical or commercial significance of the finding before moving to the scientific method. This is not a compromise of rigour — it is recognition that the abstract is the most-read section of any paper.

3. Connect the preprint to your investor materials explicitly

   A bioRxiv DOI should appear in your pitch deck, your EIC application, your grant submission, and your investor data room. It provides a citable, timestamped record of the scientific claim that forms the foundation of your commercial case — and it lets any evaluator read the underlying evidence independently, which is exactly the kind of transparency that builds trust with technically sophisticated audiences.

4. Monitor and report engagement metrics

   bioRxiv preprints generate download data that is publicly accessible. A preprint with 3,000 downloads and active commentary in the field is evidence of genuine scientific community interest that can be reported in a funding context. Track these metrics from the day of posting and incorporate them into your investor and grant communications as they accumulate.

5. Proceed to peer-reviewed publication without delay

   A preprint is not a substitute for publication — it is a bridge to it. The funding value of a preprint decreases significantly if peer-reviewed publication does not follow within a reasonable timeframe, because sophisticated investors and grant committees understand that peer review is the standard that validates scientific claims. The bioRxiv to Journals initiative allows authors to submit a manuscript directly to a journal's submission system through bioRxiv itself.

What a Preprint Cannot Do

In the interest of honest strategy, it is worth being direct about what bioRxiv posting does not accomplish, however well executed. Three limitations are particularly worth naming.

1. A preprint does not satisfy regulatory requirements

   EMA submissions, CE marking applications under MDR, and FDA 510(k) or PMA filings require peer-reviewed published evidence or equivalent validated data. A preprint is not a substitute and should not be positioned as one in any regulatory context. The moment a preprint citation appears in a regulatory file as primary evidence, that file weakens.

2. A preprint is not equivalent to peer-reviewed publication in academic terms

   For researchers whose institutional standing depends on publication record, a bioRxiv preprint does not contribute to the metrics that promotion committees evaluate. It is a communication tool, not a career currency. The two functions can be separated, but they should not be confused.

3. A preprint does not independently validate scientific claims

   The community scrutiny that bioRxiv generates is valuable but not equivalent to the structured, independent expert review that peer publication provides. Sophisticated life sciences investors understand this distinction, and the ones worth working with will conduct their own scientific due diligence regardless of preprint engagement metrics.

The Bottom Line

Used honestly and strategically — as a tool for visibility, priority establishment, and credibility signalling at the specific moment when funding conversations are live — bioRxiv is one of the most cost-effective and underused resources available to biotech and medtech founders in Europe and Israel.

The paper is ready. The investors are looking. The gap between those two facts is shorter than most researchers realise — provided the preprint is posted with strategic intent, integrated into a real funding conversation, and followed by the peer-reviewed publication that confirms what the preprint suggested.