About

Innovation can be tailored to solve critical healthcare industry problems benefiting everyone – but a bridge from entrepreneur to executive is needed.

Jumpstart Capital exists to bridge this divide. We understand the industry’s needs and connect the right entrepreneurs with the right solution at the right time.

Jumpstart Capital’s Managing Partner, Vic Gatto, co-founded Jumpstart Health Investors in 2015 as a new venture capital firm to redesign the way innovation is brought to market in healthcare. The venture business has traditionally focused on gaining access to the best deals. It is a business in which a small number of startups achieve incredible success and produce 20-40x financial returns to the early venture investors. The Founders of these huge successes are either incredibly talented or incredibly lucky. Either way – the venture model works by being invested in one of these “unicorn” deals. For this reason, most of a traditional VC’s time and attention is poured into (a) trying to identify the next high-potential team and (2) trying to gain the right to invest in these teams. We refer to this as the access challenge.

Jumpstart Capital takes a novel approach to solve the access challenge by outsourcing it to our sister fund, Jumpstart Foundry. This fund is designed to invest in 30-50 of the highest potential pre-seed healthcare teams every year. Jumpstart Foundry establishes an investment in this broad portfolio of the best ideas and best teams each year. It has its own team and Limited Partners. The fund supports these emerging innovations with educational programs, speakers, and introductions to customers and capital. However, Jumpstart Foundry never makes a second investment. Instead, it allows Jumpstart Capital to gain access to these companies after they begin to demonstrate market success.

In addition, we partner with another sister fund, Jumpstart Nova, to gain access to the best Black-founded and led early-stage healthcare companies. Investing capital in diverse and often overlooked founders is important work and makes the healthcare industry better. Jumpstart Nova is managed by Jumpstart Health Investor’s co-founder Marcus Whitney. It is a majority Black-owned General Partner and invests exclusively in Black founded and led healthcare companies. Through this relationship, Jumpstart Capital gets to invest alongside Nova, adding capacity to help this chronically underfunded cohort of founders.

Of course, Jumpstart Capital can and does invest in deals through traditional sources, but these two sources of deal flow effectively solve the access challenge. This provides Jumpstart Capital the opportunity to invest our time and attention to develop insight into the market needs. We work to clearly define the demand for innovation by working with our strategic industry partners. We then use this market insight to guide our investment criteria and proactively search for innovations to address the specific challenges defined by our partners.

Often Jumpstart will identify a startup with a partial solution to the challenge. In these cases, we will attempt to mold and shape their product or service to fit within the needs of the health system. We evaluate the team’s willingness to change as well as the technical feasibility prior to investment. One of the benefits of working with early-stage companies is they are often willing to accommodate as the modifications may improve their probability of success.

The combination of novel sources of access to the best emerging teams of entrepreneurs and unique insight into market demand both differentiate Jumpstart Capital from other venture funds. We call this investment process Collaborative Innovation and have found it to dramatically increase our investment success rate.