Welcome Emre Karatas!

Announcing the addition of Emre Karatas, our newest partner at Virtue

TL;DR — we are excited to announce that Emre Karatas has joined Virtue as our newest Partner!

Virtue was launched in 2021 and purpose-built to exclusively serve the unique needs and company demands of healthcare founders at the earliest stage of their startup journey. By pairing high precision capital with deep market understanding, industry relationships & executive advisors, product development and GTM playbooks, etc., we help ensure that your company foundation is sufficiently strong in order to realize subsequent scale and desired impact.

We are presently living in the most exciting period for health innovation ever — fueled by generational tailwinds across regulatory, technological, societal adoption and cost/care trends and led by a growing influx of diverse operational and technical talent — and one in which we anticipate will accelerate even further in the coming decade. Yet amidst an increasing amount of capital flowing into our sector in recent years (~$30B in 2021!) we see it as more important than ever to equip our founders with more than just dollars during their most formative company build phase.

Furthermore we are building Virtue to reflect where the proverbial healthcare puck is going. It is our belief that the new generation of healthcare investor will require a greater fluency across their healthcare investment aperture as the definition of what constitutes a ‘healthcare’ or perhaps more simply, a ‘health’ company, continues to expand. This modern healthcare investor is as comfortable with scaling business models across SaaS & D2C as they are with tech-enabled services — we must possess range that spans from the molecule-level to Medicaid carve-outs to engineering multi-sided marketplace liquidity.

So, without further ado, I am incredibly excited to announce Emre Karatas as the newest investment partner at Virtue!

While I have known Emre for 4+ years (and attempted to hire him previously!) it was immediately clear when talking to founders, co-investors and industry leaders that Emre is special. He possesses the unique ability to present genuine intellectual horsepower and natural curiosity with a human-first sensibility in every decision and interaction.

Emre’s healthcare journey started as an undergrad at UPenn where he majored in neuroscience and spent most of his time in the lab studying genetic and biological influences on brain disorders. Post-graduation, as a consultant at Health Advances, Emre worked with medtech, biopharma, and diagnostics clients to define and implement their respective digital health strategies. More recently, Emre spent the last 3+ years at DigiTx Partners, where he invested in and supported a wide range of early stage digital health startups with a focus on novel commercial and GTM strategies.

Above all else, Emre exudes a clear passion for the potential of digital health as well as the courage to tackle really hard healthcare problems. His enthusiasm is infectious and he is as mission-driven as the founders that we seek to partner with.

I am excited to welcome my friend Emre Karatas as our newest Virtue partner!

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