Expanding into Healthcare and Life Sciences Vertical

In case you were on vacation and missed our news last week, we’ve recruited the Senior VP and Head of Life Sciences from a leading U.S. commercial bank to drive financings in innovative life sciences companies — and the feedback has been excellent.

Jeff Chapman will work in our Sand Hill Road (Menlo Park, CA) office, with the title of Partner and Head of Healthcare & Life Sciences.

Jeff is a seasoned life sciences investment professional, most recently serving as Senior Vice President and Head of Life Sciences at Comerica Bank where he was responsible for life science debt financings within its multi-billion dollar Technology and Life Science loan portfolio. Finding success in lending is always about having the right people, and with Jeff joining the team, we can substantially increase our growth capital investments in innovative life science and healthcare companies.

Life sciences has always presented exciting investment opportunities with so many innovative companies bringing transformative technologies, services and products to market in the U.S., Canada and United Kingdom. In fact, for many venture debt and growth capital funds in the USA, their Life Science portfolio is larger than their IT loan bucket.  Although we’ve been lending to the sector since 2004 (TM Bioscience was in Wellington Financial Fund II, for example, prior to being acquired by Luninex), and count Toronto’s Insception Lifebank as an active portfolio company today, we felt we could do better.

And that takes the right people in the right market(s).

Prior to Comerica Bank, Jeff served as Director at a private venture debt firm, where he financed companies in the biopharmaceutical, medical device, diagnostic and tools industries. Previously he worked in Johnson & Johnson’s pharmaceutical business development group where he focused on the metabolic and immune-mediated inflammatory disorders therapeutic areas. He began his career working at LabVelocity, a venture-backed life sciences technology start-up.

Jeff received a B.S. in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He also spent two years as a doctoral candidate in Biomedical Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco.

Please join us as we welcome Jeff to our growing team.

MRM