NeuroNetworks Fund

Neuro Networks Fund is a Venture Philanthropy fund that was established in 213. The fund is looking to make equity investments into companies and projects ranging from $25 for research projects and up to $5 million for early stage companies. The firm will reinvest all returns from these investments back into its fund in an evergreen structure. The firm hopes to begin making its first investments as soon as Q4 214 but is currently very open to discussion and networking with companies in its target sectors. The firm is open to review opportunities from around the globe.
Brian Horsburgh
Trustee 
Sunil Shah
Partner 
Prashant Shah
Partner 

Pappas Ventures

Pappas Ventures is a Venture Capital company based in Durham North Carolina founded in 1994. The firm manages 4 funds for a total of approximately $35 million in assets under management. The firms is currently investing out of its $1 million 4th fund focused exclusively on the life sciences. The firm looks to provide up to $5 million of preferred equity capital in the initial round and up to $1 million over the life of the investment. The firm is very flexible in terms of period to exit but generally looks to exit in around 5 years. The firm plans to make 2-3 investments over the next 6-9 months and will consider companies throughout North America.
Jayson Punwani
Associate 

PATH

PATH is an international nonprofit global health organization that was founded in 1977 and is headquartered in Seattle with 12+ employees in more than 3 offices around the world. PATH is one of the largest nonprofit organizations in global health today. PATH works on a wide array of emerging and persistent global health issues in the areas of health technologies maternal health child health reproductive health vaccines and immunization and emerging and epidemic diseases such as HIV malaria and tuberculosis. PATH is best known for developing and adapting technologies such as improved vaccination devices and new tools to prevent cervical cancer to address the health needs of developing countries. It targets health problems evaluates possible solutions and assesses whether they would be useful in finding health solutions.
Bill Cadwallader
Senior Commercialization Officer Diagnostics 
Greg Zwisler
Commercialization Officer 

Pfizer Venture Investments United States

Pfizer Venture Investments (PVI) is the corporate venture capital arm of Pfizer and was founded in 2004. PVI has an annual investments budget of $50 million and invests up to $10M per investing round. The firm focuses mainly on U.S. startups but has global reach. PVI attempts to allocate 80% of its funding to U.S. based companies and utilizes the remaining 20% for international ventures. PVI provides equity funding for private companies in need of seed, growth, or venture financing. Remaining opportunistic, PVI focuses entirely on high growth prospects in all sectors and all phases of development. The ideal candidate has a potential for high growth and returns. Additionally, PVI will seek to in-license products and buyout companies if the opportunity arises.

Barbara Dalton
Vice President 

Plug and Play Tech Center United States

Plug and Play Ventures (a successor fund to Amidzad Partners) is a private/family investment vehicle based in Silicon Valley, CA. The fund is a structured organization for making angel investments in pre-seed or seed rounds. Investments are in the form of equity; in the next 6 months Plug and Play Ventures expects to make about 5-10 seed investments of $50,000-100,000 and an additional 40 pre-seed investments of $25,000, and is hoping to increase their allocations in the healthcare sector. Plug and Play also provides a three-month accelerator program. The firm will consider investing in companies worldwide.

Plug and Play Ventures is interested in investing in medical technology, and invests in subsectors in which the firm can apply expertise; typically this means products that have a significant software component. Healthcare IT, biosensors, wearables and health monitoring devices are of interest. While the firm is open to investing in any indication, Plug and Play is particularly interested in diabetes & blood glucose monitoring, personal fitness, and mental/behavioral disorders. In the healthcare IT sector, Plug and Play Ventures is interested in both consumer applications and enterprise software, but is not interested in diagnostic software such as genomic, proteomic, or molecular diagnostic algorithms; however, optimization and data analysis software for hospitals and diagnostic laboratories is of interest.

Phillip Vincent
Corporate Partnerships Manager 

Plug and Play Ventures United States

Plug and Play Ventures (a successor fund to Amidzad Partners) is a private/family investment vehicle based in Silicon Valley, CA. The fund is a structured organization for making angel investments in pre-seed or seed rounds. Investments are in the form of equity; in the next 6 months Plug and Play Ventures expects to make about 5-10 seed investments of $50,000-100,000 and an additional 40 pre-seed investments of $25,000, and is hoping to increase their allocations in the healthcare sector. Plug and Play also provides a three-month accelerator program. The firm will consider investing in companies worldwide.  

Plug and Play Ventures is interested in investing in medical technology, and invests in subsectors in which the firm can apply expertise; typically this means products that have a significant software component. Healthcare IT, biosensors, wearables and health monitoring devices are of interest. While the firm is open to investing in any indication, Plug and Play is particularly interested in diabetes & blood glucose monitoring, personal fitness, and mental/behavioral disorders. In the healthcare IT sector, Plug and Play Ventures is interested in both consumer applications and enterprise software, but is not interested in diagnostic software such as genomic, proteomic, or molecular diagnostic algorithms; however, optimization and data analysis software for hospitals and diagnostic laboratories is of interest.


Neda Amidi
Investment Associate 

Prize4Life

Prize4Life is a non-profit organization founded in 2006 in Cambridge, MA focused on accelerating therapy development for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, aka Lou Gehrig's disease). Prize4Life uses incentive prizes to attract new minds and drive innovation in ALS drug development. The organization is running the $1M Avi Kremer ALS Treatment Prize4Life challenge for preclinical validation of a novel ALS therapeutic in an ALS mouse model, and submissions to this prize will be accepted until June 6th 2015. In addition to prizes, Prize4Life also runs infrastructure programs to support the ALS research community, such as the ALS FORUM, an online portal of cutting edge research and drug development news in ALS (www.researchals.org).

Sara Shnider
Executive Director 

RCT Ventures

RCT Ventures invests in early-stage life science companies including medical devices, drug discovery platforms, and research tools.

Paul Grand
Paul Grand
LinkedIn logo Managing Director 
BIO

Grand is responsible for sourcing RCT’s investments in medical devices and representing RCT on the boards of its portfolio companies.

Prior to joining RCT, Grand was co-founder and VP Operations of Imagine Pharmaceuticals, which developed a platform to selectively deliver therapeutics and other compounds across the blood brain barrier. He was also co-founder and CEO of MicroSurgeon, which developed a microwave thermal ablation device for the treatment of solid tumors.

Grand has extensive experience in new company formation and fund raising. Since 1990, he has built, operated, recruited management and raised financing for eight high technology, medical device and biotechnology companies. Grand also was a Managing Director for Fruition Ventures, a group of private equity investors focused primarily on tech companies.

Grand is actively involved in programs to encourage bio-entrepreneurship, innovation and commercialization of University technologies. He has lectured, judged business plans, and mentored students and scientists at numerous universities, including UCLA, Stanford, USC, and UCSF. Grand serves as an investment advisor to the LARTA NIH Commercialization Assistance Program for SBIR program awardees. He is on the Oversight Committees for the Coulter Translational Research Partnership Programs at USC and University of Washington. Grand is a reviewer for proof of concept and commercialization-focused funding programs for the University of California system-wide, USC, University of Utah and University of Colorado. 

Grand is a frequent panelist at biomedical conferences. He has spoken at more than 100 conferences, been featured in hundreds of articles in publications including Forbes, New York Times and Wall Street Journal and appeared as an expert on Bloomberg Television, CNN, and CNN/FN. Grand serves as Producer and Host for the MedTech Innovator competition that seeks to discover outstanding early-stage MedTech opportunities - http://medtechinnovator.com

Chad Souvignier
Managing Director 

RiverVest Venture Partners United States

RiverVest Venture Partners is a venture capital firm that was founded in 2000 and is based in St. Louis, Missouri with additional office in Cleveland, Ohio. The firm currently has managed over $208 million of total assets. RiverVest has raised two investment funds with total committed capital of $165 million since inception. The recent fund closed at $75 million. RiverVest typically makes equity investments into global companies, and has no specific geographic preferences. The firm will consider making investments at all the stages, and focuses on investments in seed, early-stage and select later-stage companies. The typical investment size is around $6 million, though the firm can invest more or less, depending on the opportunity. 

RiverVest is extremely opportunistic when it comes to investments in the life sciences space; with that being said RiverVests specified sectors and sub sectors of interest may or may not be an area in which RiverVest is currently looking to allocate capital to. The firm invests in companies in the biotech therapeutics and diagnostics, as well the medical technology space. 

Some of the firms investments have included companies developing biotech therapeutics and diagnostics targeting diseases of the blood and blood forming organs, neoplasms, cancer, and oncology, skin and subcutaneous tissue, cardiovascular diseases, diseases of the ear, and infectious diseases. The firm has also invested in companies developing anti-body based therapeutics. The firm has also invested in firms developing medical technologies such as therapeutic radiation devices, active implantable devices, non active implantable devices, hospital hardware, and imaging devices.

Year Founded
2000
Investor Type
Medtech Phase of Development
Capital Structure Preference
Investment Stage Preference
Karen Spilizewski
VP