Windham Venture Partners appointed David Kereiakes as managing partner. He brings over a decade of experience in investing in healthcare innovation and will lead the firm’s new Cincinnati office, giving Windham a foothold in the Midwest region.
Kereiakes has helped healthcare entrepreneurs achieve over $1 billion in value and played leading roles in $250 million in private placements, according to a Windham announcement. He joins from Providence Ventures, the venture capital fund of the Providence St. Joseph Health system in Washington State, where he was instrumental in the closing of several digital health and medtech deals.
The launch of Windham’s Cincinnati office aims to tap into the innovation happening in the Midwest, a large region with a fast-growing tech economy that has been overlooked by investors. According to Statista.com, the Midwest as a whole receives less than 5% of all VC funding, while New York, California and Massachusetts have taken in over 75% of all VC dollars in recent years. Cincinnati, a metropolitan area where five of the six largest employers are health systems or research centers, is a strong market for health innovation.
Kereiakes brings years of experience in the Midwest. He served as president and board member of the Chicago-based Mid-America Health Investors Network for two years, representing over 60 active healthcare funds and hundreds of investment managers in matters including shaping public policy. Prior to that he was at RC Capital, a Cincinnati-based healthcare growth equity funds.
“The strategic appointment, bringing David back to Cincinnati, enables Windham to tap into and
support the incredible innovation happening in Ohio and other Midwestern states, which often
do not receive the same level of attention from investors as do cities like New York, Boston, and
San Francisco,” said Adam Fine, Windham co-founder, general partner and CEO.
New York-based Windham is focused on medtech and digital health. The firm has notched several exits in recent years, including Cartiva, an orthopedic devices developer that was sold to Wright Medical Group for $435 million; Personal Genome Diagnostics, a developer of tools for personalized cancer genome analysis, which LabCorp acquired in 2021 for $450 million; and Neotract, a developer surgical devices for urological and gynecological disorders that was sold to Teleflex in 2017 for $1.1 billion.