Ours is an extremely competitive business. In addition to providing capital, venture capitalists assist with recruiting, connecting portfolio companies to potential customers, and engaging in strategic discussions. Great entrepreneurs have no shortage of investors with whom to partner. Therefore, the privileged position for investors is to flex on thought leadership and be able to draw on relevant prior experiences. As such, we could not be more excited to welcome Dr. Graham Gardner and Dr. Rochelle Walensky as Executive Partners to the firm.
Graham founded and scaled one of the most meaningful companies in the healthcare technology sector, Kyruus Health, which he sold very successfully at the end of 2025 to RevSpring. After getting two degrees from Brown University (BA, MD), Graham practiced medicine for several years before getting his MBA at Harvard Business School. He then became a venture capitalist, but not for long as he quickly started his first company while serving as a Venture Executive at Highland Capital Partners.
Graham has been well known to us for many years. In fact, one of our other Executive Partners (Gary Gottlieb) served on the Kyruus Health board for over a decade. In addition to offering thoughtful strategic advice to our portfolio companies, Graham has an extraordinary network among provider and payer executives which will be a tremendous commercial resource as well. The path to building a significant company is nonlinear as companies search for product / market fit and Graham will be a great asset along that journey.
Rochelle was also known to all of us, if nothing else from seeing her on television every day during the height of Covid in her capacity as the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2021 – 2023, providing thoughtful, competent, and reassuring assessments as to how the pandemic was unfolding. As a recognized infectious disease expert, Rochelle is deeply articulate about issues confronting the healthcare system at large. Much of her academic work now as a Senior Fellow at Harvard University (where she also received her MPH, in addition to having an MD from Johns Hopkins University and a BA from Washington University) is focused on the clinical and economic outcomes of medical decisions, with a specific emphasis on access to public health.
Many of our founders are focused on technologies that utilize AI to affect systemic transformations of the healthcare delivery system. Rochelle will be an extraordinary resource for those portfolio companies that look to address the system’s shortcomings and failures with an emphasis on lowering costs and improving access. She, too, is incredibly well networked in the public policy arena, and obviously, the role of government officials and regulators is critical as the healthcare industry is being re-architected.
Please join us in welcoming these two healthcare industry leaders to the Flare Capital team.
An update on another important component of our extended team, which is our Flare Scholars program and Flare Scholar Ventures (FSV), our pre-seed investment initiative for Flare Scholar-sponsored projects. With 509 current and former Flare Scholars, who are young brilliant passionate emerging healthcare technology entrepreneurs, we now have 38 FSV portfolio companies, meaningfully exceeding our initial goal. Four of those companies are now significant core investments while 16 have raised meaningful follow-on rounds of capital. In total, our FSV companies have raised more than $400 million, most notably and recently is Qualified Health. The progress of the FSV program is inspirational as we continue to on-board the next generation of great healthcare technology entrepreneurs.
We hope you will join us for our next quarterly Expert Roundtable Series on June 9, 2026 at 12:00pm ET (register here). To stay connected, subscribe here for the latest updates, news, and insights from Flare Capital Partners.