INVESTMENT TEAM
Rick Blume, Managing Director
Rick Blume has been financing companies in healthcare for over three decades. His early investment banking career involved financing and banking relationships with hospitals, payers, physicians, and new biotech companies. The excitement he saw at Genentech, in its early years, led him to transition into venture capital in the mid 1980's. Rick co-founded CB Health Ventures in 1998. He is currently on the Board at Saladax Biomedical.
In each of his five prior venture funds, Rick has followed the same successful strategy: invest broadly in healthcare across various sectors and stages and focus on businesses that lower costs and improve outcomes. By having savvy healthcare providers as limited partners and advisers, Rick has built up an extraordinary network to help with due diligence and market acceptance issues.
Rick has served as a director or active investor in many companies including Cytyc (acquired by Hologic - HOLX), AbT (now OSI - OSIP), Somatogen (acquired by Baxter - BAX), EdenTec (acquired by Nellcor), Exact Sciences (EXAS), IPC The Hospitalist Company (IPCM), GeneOhm (acquired by Becton Dickinson - BDX), Zonare, US Servis (acquired by McKesson); and the former public health insurance company Washington National. In addition to Excel, Rick has been active in initiating and teaching courses in venture capital and entrepreneurship at both Boston College Carroll School of Management and Simmons College School of Management, and serving on the Boards of the Chicago Biomedical Consortium, the National Regenerative Medicine Foundation, and Stanford Associates Board of Governors. Rick did his undergraduate studies at University of the Pacific and Stanford. His MBA is from Stanford University.
Juan Enriquez, Managing Director
Juan Enriquez is a leading authority on the economic impact of life sciences on business and society and is a respected business leader and entrepreneur. Juan represents Excel on the boards of Foodsmart, NeoSensory, Openwater and Viridos.
Prior to Excel, Juan was the founding Director of the Harvard Business School's Life Sciences Project, with many of his innovative thoughts captured in his bestselling book, As The Future Catches You, which provided an accurate blueprint of how a bio-based economy changes industries and corporations.
His most recent publication is Evolving Ourselves: How Unnatural Selection and Nonrandom Mutation are Changing Life on Earth which he co-authored with Steve Gullans, which describes a world where humans increasingly shape their environment, themselves, and other species.
Following HBS, Juan became an active angel investor and founder of Biotechonomy Ventures which invested in BioTrove, Xcellerex, and Viridos (formerly Synthetic Genomics), a company he co founded with Drs. J. Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith to apply synthetic biology solutions to address global energy, medicine, clean water, and food challenges. As a business leader, advisor, and renowned speaker, Juan works directly with the CEOs of a number of Fortune 50 companies, as well as various heads of state, on how to adapt to a world where the dominant language is shifting from the digital towards the language of life. Mr. Enriquez serves on a number of boards including Cabot Corp., the Public Interfaces Steering Committee of the Division of Earth & Life Sciences of the National Academy of Sciences, The Genetics Advisory Council of Harvard Medical School, and the Visiting Committee of Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center. He graduated from Harvard with a B.A. and an M.B.A., both with honors. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Caleb Winder, Managing Director
Caleb has nearly 25 years of operating, startup, and financing experience in life science and healthcare companies. He plays an instrumental role in sourcing and structuring deals and works closely with portfolio companies to form strategic partnerships and to develop commercialization and marketing strategies. He currently (or formerly) represents Excel as a Board Director or Observer at Aileron, Aventura, Ayogo, ClearData, InfoBionic, MedVentive (sold to McKesson), Molecular Templates, Oculus Health, Qstream, ShapeUp (sold to Virgin Pulse), Saladax Biomedical, and Welldoc.
Prior to joining Excel, Caleb was a Principal at Biotechonomy Ventures, where he financed and managed several entrepreneurial ventures, including Viridos (formerly Synthetic Genomics), where he was also the Director of Finance, BioTrove (sold to Life Technologies), Biocius (sold to Agilent Technologies), and Xcellerex (sold to GE).
Prior to becoming a venture capitalist, Caleb was an award-winning sales and marketing executive at medical equipment and diagnostics companies. He received his M.B.A. from Babson College, magna cum laude, where he was a Babson Fellow in the Center for Technology Enterprise. He received a B.A. in Biology with a minor in Economics from Colby College.
Chris Seitz, Venture Fellow
Prior to joining Excel, Chris was a consultant at Health Advances, a healthcare strategy consulting firm. At Health Advances, he advised clients in biopharma, medical devices, diagnostics, health IT and digital health, and health services, performing due diligence, market assessment and forecasting, and corporate strategy development. Before Health Advances, Chris interned at ZocDoc in their marketing and business development team and conducted research at Baylor’s Genomics Center.
Chris received his B.A. in Biology and German with a focus on Pre-Medicine from Williams College. Chris is currently attending Wharton Business School where he is majoring in Healthcare Management and is an Investment Partner at Dorm Room Fund.