Startup Tri-Valley is thrilled to present the co-founders of Avestria VC, a Raydiant Oximetry early stage investor, and Tri-Valley-adjacent residents. Their thesis is to focus on the unseen opportunity presented by female founders in healthcare and by entrepreneurs focused on developing solutions for women's health. Our conversation was so rich with information for Tri-Valley founders, we kept rolling for over an hour. As a result, we bring you not one, but two parts so you can experience the full value that Managing Partner Linda Greub and Partner, Tracy Dooley, MD, have to to offer. Part 1 sets the stage for how Linda and Tracy came to found Avestria VC and quite a bit about their thesis closing with advice on what makes a good CEO and Board. Part 2 continues with concrete advice for founders.
Linda Greub is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Avestria VC. She's a fifth-generation Bay Area native who has spent the past 30+ years investing in public and private life science companies as an institutional investor, a corporate M&A executive, a hedge fund analyst, and a private venture investor.
She invested over $3.2B of equity capital at Tudor Investments and Essex Investment Management, built profitable equity research franchise in healthcare at Banc of America Securities and Pacific Growth Equities, and led M&A at both Novartis Diagnostics and Applied Biosystems, including the $5.1B cash and stock sale of ABI to Life Technologies Corp. in 2008. She has also held corporate development and finance roles at a number of venture-backed life science companies, including VitaPath Genetics, Singulex, Raindance Technologies (sold to Bio-Rad), and Linkage Biosciences (sold to Thermo Fisher). In addition to finance, operations, and M&A, Linda's expertise extends to the life sciences, specifically in diagnostics, genomics, healthcare services, and life science tools. In 2019, Linda co-founded Avestria.
Tracy Dooley, MD, Partner and Co-Founder of Avestria VC, was raised in the melting pot of the Bay Area before attending USC to major in biomedical engineering, Tracy took to heart Theodore von Kármán’s famous quote: “Scientists discover the world that exists; engineers create the world that never was.” In pursuit of creating a better world, she headed to medical school at Stanford where she quickly experienced firsthand the challenges of getting innovative products into the hands of clinicians to ultimately improve patient care.
Pivoting to industry, Tracy spent several years in healthcare M&A, then moved to Novartis Diagnostics, where she worked with Linda. As Chief of Staff to the President, she led strategy and built out the innovation pipeline, then headed global operations. More recently Tracy has been focused in digital health, where she advised a range of organizations, from early-stage startups to the Novartis Digital Accelerator Lab and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, before joining Avestria.