“Trillions of dollars have been spent on healthcare, yet the system is broken. It is not creating enough positive impact for the patients who need it the most,” says Jenny Barba, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Features Capital. “We invest in early-stage companies that are radically transforming the healthcare landscape and closing the healthcare divide with technologies that improve outcomes, create efficiencies, increase access, and reduce costs.”

Fellow Co-Founder, Jeff Chu, shares a statistic “The growth of healthcare costs in the U.S., which are currently approaching 20% of the GDP, is exceeding growth of the GDP,” Chu shares, “so it’s a problem that requires transformational, innovative solutions.” Revolutionary medical technologies are key to making critical gains needed to address the catastrophic healthcare crisis. “We created Features to accelerate the future of healthcare by helping entrepreneurs and LPs Unlock MedTech,” says Chu.

About Features Capital

Features Capital invests in early-stage medical technology, healthcare innovation, and health equity companies. The firm is investing in visionary entrepreneurs and brilliant teams who are creating technologies that address critical unmet needs in the healthcare market, with a particular focus on solutions that expand patients’ access to care and address diseases that are straining the healthcare system. Features is building a portfolio of companies at the first-in-human and first-revenue stages.

Good Timing, Shared Perspectives

Timing lined up just right for Barba and Chu to launch Features together. What started as Barba seeking out startup feedback from Chu led to the pair realizing that they could join forces and expand their impact by leveraging their unique and complementary career experiences, robust networks across innovation hubs, and strategic relationships. It was their eureka moment.

Chu, who was going through an exit at the time, knew he had another career in him. “Thinking about how to leverage all the experiences I’d had over a twenty-year period, partnering with Jenny would provide the things I was seeking: venture capital would give me the opportunity to continue building products, teams, and companies, and also be able to nurture them and watch them grow.” The pair knew their partnership was a match with their aligned values of trust, integrity, hard work ethic, making a difference in healthcare and their families.

Both Barba and Chu’s experiences as members of underrepresented demographics informs their concerned effort to diversify the pool of those receiving venture capital in healthcare. “We have the opportunity to help change the face of venture in different ways,” Chu reflects, going on to describe how he imagines this change happening. “It’s investing in emerging founders who think differently and have an open mind; and it’s also investing in people who come from outside of established ecosystems, who can then become the future LPs who then invest in other entrepreneurs and continue this flywheel. But the flywheel’s gotta get started.”

Having seen firsthand how difficult it can be to access the closed networks of VC, he wants to help other emerging managers in doing so. “How we think about investing is really looking at key features of the company that we think are necessary to be successful,” shares Chu. “And we’ve developed a playbook to help address the gaps we identify.” The Features Capital Playbook helps companies to identify opportunities quickly; create risk mitigation plans; avoid costly mistakes; and find creative business and commercialization solutions, while building value creation milestones for investor returns.

A Powerful Combination of Experiences

While Barba and Chu together have over forty-five-years of experience investing in, operating, and advising healthcare companies, they’ve had strikingly different professional journeys that complement each other well and mold the foundation of Features Capital. “We really come from different places in our journeys to get to venture,” says Chu. “ Whether products, teams, or companies, Chu, a biomedical engineer, has spent his career focused on building and operating. “I enjoy watching teams succeed,” he shares, “and I enjoy watching the successful commercialization of transformative products. I think about how to close gaps and put a company on the trajectory to an exit.” He built, scaled, and exited his own MedTech company, and also has experience as a researcher, inventor, entrepreneur, operator, and investor.

Barba, who holds an MBA and an MPH from the University of Michigan, has a background in the finance and strategy side of healthcare, where she’s spent her career building trusted relationships connecting companies to institutional capital. In her studies to be a neuroscientist, she knew that there had to be a better way to finance critical medical advancement. Over the past twenty-five years, she’s completed more than $4 billion in public and private offerings; mergers and acquisitions; and as an LP and venture investor.

“Jeff’s a builder; I’m a connector,” Barba says with clarity. “My role is to connect these brilliant founders and management teams and boards with the capital that will allow the company to build and scale.” The pair’s combined and complementary expertise positions them to provide expert strategic, operational, and technical support to the companies in their portfolio.

Investing With Intention

Features is investing in teams led by founders who’ve experienced the barriers to healthcare that their technologies are looking to solve. “We think about the importance of investing in overlooked visionaries and diverse teams,” Chu shares, “who have experienced these things and who come from different industries and think about the problems in a different way. Our unique alpha comes from our ability to support these founders with strategic, operational, and technical support when they need it the most.” This commitment to seeking out emerging founders sets them apart from others in their industry. “A lot of our competition only invests in founders they’ve backed before,” Barba says. “I’ve been in meetings where, unless people look the same, talk the same way, or went to the same school or club, they don’t get any attention.”

“When thinking about any investment,” Chu says, “part of our thorough diligence process is speaking with leading clinicians and we always ask one simple question: ‘if you have access to this technology, will it change the way you practice medicine?’ If the answer is yes, the next question to pose is: ‘Who’s going to buy this company?’ Given that most exits in MedTech come from acquisitions rather than IPOs, Features Capital focuses on getting companies ready through that lens.

“We think about what the business needs to look like at the point of sale,” Chu shares, “and how we help them navigate towards value inflection points and a commercial exit.” Features is backed by a powerful network of LPs that includes C-suite executives from public and private equity healthcare companies; physicians and surgeons; foundations and trusts; family offices; health systems, and the State of Vermont. “We are known for our thorough diligence, early-stage deal sourcing, broad networks, mentoring, team building, and rolling up our sleeves,” she explains, “LPs are excited about our portfolio.”

Seeing Impact in the World

“We hear validation every day – from founders, VCs, and C-suite executives in the industry – that affirms our work,” says Barba. Beyond that, Barba and Chu are seeing the impact of Features Capital’s work on patients’ lives. One Features portfolio company, Laplace Interventional, is in clinical trials with a technology that will dramatically improve the lives of patients with tricuspid heart valve disease, impacting over seven million patients in the U.S. and E.U. and predicted to be a $3 to $5 billion market.

“If you have a leaky valve,” Barba points out, “your quality of life is hugely impacted. You can’t stand up, walk, breathe well, sleep at night, and forget about activities like playing with your grandkids. The only solutions are open heart surgery, medical management, or nothing.” Because of the high risk of an open heart operation, only those who qualify are treated, and many patients are excluded. “Laplace’s proprietary technology we invested in is minimally invasive,” Barba adds, “so instead of doing open heart surgery, interventional cardiologists can do a minimal incision, insert and deploy the valve in 25-35 minutes, and then the next day the patients are getting up and walking out of the hospital with their own power,” as compared to the multi-day hospital stay and weeks-long recovery period for open heart surgery.

This is just one example of how Features Capital’s investments in MedTech innovation is expanding people’s ability to live longer, healthier, more fulfilling, and more productive lives. “Every single person, throughout their life, from cradle to grave, is directly affected by medical technology,” Chu shares. Given the ways that medical technologies are embedded in our everyday lives and ability to survive, the potential for Features Capital’s impact is massive.

Features thoughtfully takes time to understand the health disparities of underserved populations with every disease and technology solution of their portfolio companies and how these solutions improve health equity, access to care, and patient outcomes. With investments in companies focused on diabetes, metabolic disease, women’s health, sterilization and manufacturing supply chain, wireless charging power for implantable devices and structural heart disease, their portfolio continues to grow.

Participating in the VC Include Fellowship

“The entire VC Include Fellowship program – from the application to the showcase into this next phase of community building that we’re in now – has blown us away,” says Barba. “We’ve been extremely impressed by everyone involved, and by the level of thoroughness and intentionality that goes into the selection of fellows, curated LPs, and experts brought in to support us.”

“We’ve been through several different accelerators as emerging managers,” Chu adds. “The one thing that stands out about VC Include for me is the level of engagement that every single staff member had with each individual fund.” He especially appreciated the tailored support that this depth of understanding allowed for. “They are taking the next step beyond knowing the people to ask, ‘How do we help this fund grow and be successful?’ Much in the same way that we think about supporting early-stage companies to be winners, the VC Include staff is meeting us where we are and creating a playbook based on what we need.”

“We spend so much time mentoring and coaching and helping others,” Barba reflects, “we are grateful and appreciative to have the entire talented team at VC Include vested in our success.”

We at VC Include are excited to be investing in Features Capital, and we look forward to seeing how they continue to positively impact healthcare for the future.

Fellowship Spotlight: Features Capital