Building in Healthcare Takes a Village
Announcing the Advisors to our Spring Entrepreneurs-in-Residence
At Human, collaboration is key. The Advisors we partner with for our EIR program, Humans in the Wild, provide tremendous value and domain expertise throughout the program. This additional support and advice allows founders to build better companies faster. In 2020, healthcare experienced ten years of acceleration in just one year — and we are partnering with founders who are building for this new paradigm. It’ll take a village to help these entrepreneurs capture this opportunity. By partnering with Binoy Bhansali, Anurag Mehta, Ally Tam, Zal Bilimoria, and Virginie Raphael, we can rise to the challenge.
Humans in the Wild Advisors build relationships with early-stage founders in the cohort, gaining exposure to how leading entrepreneurs are reshaping their respective industries. Advisors are given the first opportunity to co-invest alongside Human in startups that they may want to pursue. Advisors interact with founders in the cohort in two different ways. Halfway through the program they are able to shape the clay by hosting Office Hours with founders with whom they are interested in connecting with. There, they listen to the founders’ ideas on his/her/their concept, shed light on key elements of the business and market, provide perspective on how to best convey the company narrative, and more. At the end of the program, the Advisors attend the Final Critique with Human Ventures’ Investment Committee and evaluate the pre-seed companies based on the founding team, market, and product.
Advisors from previous cohorts share highlights from their experience:
“For me, it was really helpful to understand what trends the smartest people out there are innovating around.” — Anna Whiteman, Coefficient Capital, Advisor to the Spring 2020 Cohort
“The most valuable aspect of serving as an Advisor to HITW was hearing about the problems that smart, entrepreneurs think is worth working on for the next 5–10 years.” — Katie Shea, Kairos, Advisor to the Spring 2020 Cohort
If you are a founder, we encourage you to get in touch with us if you believe this program would accelerate your company. If you are an investor and know any founders we should be considering, please direct them to this link.
Spring 2021 Advisors
Binoy Bhansali is Managing Director of Sandbox Industries which is the exclusive provider of investment management services to Blue Cross Blue Shield Venture Partners. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Healthify, Quilted Health, InsightIn Health and Ideal Option and helps manage the Fund’s investments in Payfone, Healthspring, and CarePathRx. Prior to joining Sandbox , Binoy was a consultant at Accenture advising healthcare organizations on mergers and acquisitions while also working part-time at a social impact investment firm, Impact Investment Partners. Binoy started his career at Citibank in its investment banking group where he worked primarily within the hospital sector.
Anurag Mehta is an investor at JJDC, the strategic venture capital arm of Johnson & Johnson, and focuses on the Consumer Health sector. He has extensive experience analyzing and advising companies at various stages in their growth cycle and works closely with JJDC portfolio companies to tackle challenges that companies face as they try to commercialize and scale their innovations, establish successful business models, and attain the right strategic exit. His prior roles include Global Head of Strategic Transactions, Consumer Health Business Development at Johnson & Johnson, Director of M&A at Credit Suisse, and Product Development, Advanced Supply Chain Planning, at Oracle.
Ally Tam is a Founding Partner of VMG Catalyst, VMG Partners’ debut $250 million venture fund focused on early-stage, tech-enabled, consumer products and services and related infrastructure and technology stacks. At VMG Catalyst, Ally is especially focused on the intersection of consumer and healthcare, where trust and loyalty are paramount. At VMG Catalyst, Ally most recently led the Series A for Monument, the digital health platform for alcohol recovery. Previously, she was a Principal at the venture capital firm, 14W, where she helped deploy over $100 million in capital across 30 deals including leading the Series A investment into Maven Clinic.
Zal Bilimoria is Founding Partner of Refactor Capital, a seed-stage venture capital firm backing founders solving fundamental human problems, including biology, health, chemicals, food, and more. Prior to co-founding the firm, Zal spent two and a half years at Andreessen Horowitz as a Partner on the investing team working across stages & sectors. He co-led investments in Omada Health, Honor, and others, and helped launch the firm’s 1st Bio Fund. Before becoming an investor, Zal spent 10 years as aProduct Manager at Microsoft, Google, Netflix, and LinkedIn. He worked on emerging markets for Windows, became one of the first monetization PMs at YouTube, and co-founded a consumer mobile startup. Later, he joined Netflix as their first Head of Mobile and worked on premium subscriptions at LinkedIn.
Virginie Raphael is an experienced early-stage investor passionate about finding ways to better align founders and funders. She is obsessed with serving founders at the earliest stages, leveraging her ability to combine deep strategic thinking with a relentless focus on execution. She is the founder of FullCircle, a New-York based pre-seed fund investing in the restructuring of the workforce and related changes in individuals’ evolving lifestyles and wellness needs. She was most recently a Managing Director at Tusk Ventures, where she was an early employee and spent eight years advising and investing in early-stage founders operating in highly regulated spaces, including digital health.
See the esteemed group of Advisors from our Fall 2020 and Spring 2020 cohorts.
About Human Ventures
Human Ventures is a business creation platform, comprised of a venture fund, startup studio, and enterprise agency. We go beyond the business model and seek opportunities to build Model Businesses with ambitious founders who are innovating around human needs. By unlocking access to a powerful network of founders, investors and corporate partners, we are creating a blueprint for the future of business to be built on purpose. Humans in the Wild is a unique, 100-day incubation program for founders who are in the early stages of developing their next big idea in Health & Wellness.
