Marcus Whitney stands out in Nashville $95 billion The healthcare industry as an investor in start-ups. In addition to co-founding a venture capital firm, he organized an annual health tech conference and co-founded the city’s professional soccer club.
And, usually, he’s the only black man in the room.
So, in the summer of 2020, as Black Lives Matter protesters flooded city streets across the country in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, Whitney began to think about the racial so evident in his industry Inequality – especially locally.
“I’m sitting at the intersection of two communities — one where I was born and one where I was admitted,” he said.
On a quiet Sunday morning after protests subsided, he lashed out a long letter His peers pointed out that the people who make the most money from Nashville’s for-profit health care industry are still almost exclusively white.
Whitney’s release on Monday sparked weeks of heated conversation.
Racial reckonings over the past few years have inspired many industries to learn about their history and practices.In healthcare, long-standing well-documented discrepancies Caring for black and white patients.
These differences already affect who gets funding for research and health startups.more than 900,000 Healthcare and social assistance companies, including home health and other health services, roughly 35,000 Blacks own — or less than 4 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Whitney wrote that the problem was not his solution, but he realized he was in a unique position as one of the few black venture capitalists in health care. So his company, Jumpstart Foundry, launched a dedicated fund to support black entrepreneurs in healthcare. He said the letter was “key” to attracting investors.
The fund is called Quick Start Nova. This is a fraction of the estimate $42 billion in venture capital Invested in health tech last year.But it did go beyond the original goal, raising the $55 million from likes Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, medical provider Cardinal Health, and the hospital chain that pioneered HCA in Nashville’s healthcare industry.
Each company measures its annual profits in billions of dollars, so the fund represents only a fraction of its investments. But Jumpstart is also just one part of their broader diversification plan. For example, since December 2020, Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly has committed $92 million to Blake-led venture capital firms, according to company spokeswoman Carrie Martin Munk.
Whitney said he doesn’t have to convince blue-chip companies that investing in black founders is a smart move, but he does have to show they have enough promising startups to choose from.
“It really symbolizes the fact that there is a disconnect between the communities. These investors simply don’t know enough black people to know if there are enough deals out there,” Whitney said. “It’s not like an indictment against them. That’s the reality of our country.”
Jumpstart Nova is the lead investor in three of the four companies it has partnered with to date. That means Whitney’s team scrutinizes the business plan, vouches for the founders, and drafts all financial and legal documents to make it easier for others to get involved.
“It’s validation. You need someone to say, ‘We’re in,'” Dr. Dreyer Porterthe San Francisco-based founder cell evolution organismone of the first startups to receive a lead investment from Jumpstart Nova.
His company is trying to simplify the process of commercializing promising cell therapies. Hundreds are in development, each of which is custom-made for the patient by using the patient’s own cells. These therapies target cancer, central nervous system diseases or viruses. Cellevolve is working with academic medical centers and small biotech companies to try to make the commercialization process more similar to how pharmaceutical companies bring drugs to market.
“Marcus was one of the few investors I spoke to who got what we were talking about right away,” Porter said. “He said, ‘It’s either not going to work at all, or it’s massive. It’s not somewhere in between.'”
Porter said his only discomfort was feeling the pressure at times to play the role of a hard-educated black entrepreneur. “People are looking for this story to tug at their heartstrings,” he said. “But that’s not my life.”
He grew up in a middle-class family in Compton, California, where his mother was a nurse and his father was a construction worker. “I can’t tell you this painful, inner-city, dramatic story,” said Porter, who holds an MD and MBA from the University of Pennsylvania.
Jumpstart primarily looks for Black-led companies with untapped profit potential. But backers of venture funds also say they expect some startups to work on addressing health inequities.
One of the fund’s initial investments is drug viruswhich integrates the medical records of people with autoimmune diseases, especially underrepresented people of color, so their personal health data can be more easily incorporated into scientific research.
PhD. James HildrethThe dean of Nashville’s Meharry School of Medicine said he hopes some startups will work to ensure health inequities don’t worsen, especially now that so many new companies in health care are built around the use of artificial intelligence. Hildreth said he worries about what big data will do without black representation in decision-making, or — as DrugViu is trying to address — in clinical data.
“Those who design algorithms sometimes unconsciously put your own prejudices Learn how algorithms are designed and how they work,” he said.
Historic Black Medical School set up its own for-profit division Seek “profitable activities consistent with Meharry’s mission to eliminate health disparities” in 2021. Meharry also invested in the Jumpstart Nova fund. Hildreth said he saw it as a money-making opportunity and made a statement to the students.
“We believe so much in the ingenuity, innovation and intelligence of people like us that we are willing to invest in them,” says Hildreth. “It is expected that the companies coming out of this fund will have a huge impact, not only on our community but on the people as a whole.”
KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that provides in-depth news coverage on health issues.
