Home / Team

People

The people who do the operating work themselves.

Two Managing Partners who have built and run the companies this fund underwrites, an advisory board with clinical, capital and corporate depth, and the institutional partners who stand behind the platform.

01The partnership 02Advisory Board 03Collaboration and exit partners 04How we partner 05Readiness analysis

§ 01 / 05

The partnership

Investors by trade. Operators by record.

Managing Partners

José Vasquéz

Managing Partner

Former Chairman of JumpStart Inc. He has founded, scaled and exited companies across media, nutrition, real estate and human-resources technology, and owned the revenue line in every one of them. What he brings to a position is that operating experience at scale, investment acumen, an advanced diligence capability, and technology and artificial-intelligence expertise. He invests the way he operated: inside the business, on the plan, alongside the management team.

Focus: Value creation, technology and artificial intelligence, operating and finance discipline
Diligence: Advanced diligence capability, applied to every position we underwrite
Coverage: The United States, from Cleveland and Miami

Full profile

Peleg Chevion

Managing Partner

Three decades of operational leadership across agriculture, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, climate, food and defense. He has spent that career doing the work this seat requires: strategic partnerships, licensing and business development, executed transaction by transaction. He sits with a company as an operating partner and a growth strategist rather than as a name on its board. A corporate finance and intellectual property attorney, an INSEAD MBA, and a former Air Force officer in aerospace. He also brings strong private equity experience.

Focus: Strategic partnerships, licensing and business development
Role: Operating partner and growth strategist
Coverage: Europe and Israel, from Basel and Tel Aviv

Full profile

Investor relations

Ana Delgado

Investor Relations

Ana brings more than a decade of entrepreneurship and cross-border operations across Brazil and the United States, with a background in healthcare administration and ongoing studies in nutrition. In investor relations at LeverVenture, she is the first point of contact for investors across Latin America, carrying each relationship from first conversation through ongoing reporting.

Focus: International investor relations
Coverage: Latin America, primarily Brazil

The coverage divides the way the work divides: innovation is sourced in Europe and Israel, and LeverVenture builds the United States commercial organization it needs once it lands here.

Investor relationships are held at the partnership. They are not published, and they are not passed to a placement desk.

§ 02 / 05

Advisory Board

Experience that has already been tested, applied with discipline.

Advisory positions of this kind are shared rather than exclusive, which is the market norm. Each advisor below holds other appointments, and each is listed with the affiliations that bear on the question we bring to them.

Dr. Rakesh M. Suri, MD, DPhil

Former President and Chief Executive Officer

A cardiac surgeon and health-system executive. He led Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi as President and Chief Executive Officer and served as Cleveland Clinic's first President of International Operations, and was earlier Professor of Surgery and Chair of the Enterprise Robotic Practice at Mayo Clinic. He practices today at Corewell Health William Beaumont University Hospital. A Rhodes Scholar with a doctorate from Oxford, he holds more than 15 patents and has published over 340 peer-reviewed papers across a career of more than 7,000 cardiac procedures.

What they bring: Clinical plausibility · Trial and evidence design · Health-system operations
On the bench for: Clinical plausibility, trial and evidence design, and whether a device or procedure survives contact with a real operating room.

Career

Sherry P. Witter

Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer

She co-founded the Witter Family Offices in late 2011 and runs both its investment arm and its operations. The office oversees a proprietary global portfolio of alternative investments across liquid and non-liquid positions and global commodities, invests directly alongside management teams, entrepreneurs and other institutional investors, and is headquartered in New York City with teams in Los Angeles and Austin.

What they bring: Long-horizon underwriting · Family-office capital · Direct co-investment
On the bench for: The long-horizon holder's read: how a growth-stage position is underwritten, held and carried through, and what a family balance sheet needs to see at each of those moments.

Career

Witter Family Offices

Dr. Eran Gefen

Vice President and Head of Medical and Scientific Affairs, OTC

He leads medical and scientific strategy for Haleon's over-the-counter consumer health portfolio: the evidence that has to hold behind a product somebody buys without a prescription, in every market it is sold in. Before Haleon he ran global medical affairs and pharmacovigilance for Abbott's medicines business, a role that put him across safety systems, labeling and post-marketing evidence at global scale. He holds our strategic advisory seat for healthcare and life sciences.

What they bring: Medical and scientific affairs · Safety and pharmacovigilance · Strategic licensing
On the bench for: Medical and scientific affairs, safety and pharmacovigilance systems, and what a large strategic actually requires of an asset before it will license or acquire it.

Career

Mitchell Presser

Co-Chair, Global Corporate

A partner at Morrison & Foerster in New York, where his practice covers mergers and acquisitions and private equity, with particular depth in food and agriculture. He was a founding partner of Paine Schwartz Partners and head of United States mergers and acquisitions at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School.

What they bring: Deal structure · Governance · Exit path · Acquisitions
On the bench for: Deal structure, governance and the exit path, read from the acquirer's side of the table rather than ours.

Career

Each advisor is listed under the office they hold and the question they are here to answer. The marks show the organizations named in each biography and belong to their owners. Showing a mark does not mean that organization endorses the fund.

§ 03 / 05

Institutional partners

The institutional partners behind the platform.

Two benches stand behind the fund, and they do different things. One audits it, administers it, papers it and advises it. The other finances the companies inside the portfolio. Both are named against a scope of work rather than shown as badges.

§ 04 / 05

How we partner

Collaborative co-investment, by default.

Shared positions are the market norm at this stage. An exclusive position is the exception, so a co-investment is the ordinary way a round gets built here rather than a fallback.

We do not need to lead to be useful

Where another investor is better placed to lead, we say so and take the position alongside them. The question we ask first is what the company needs, not what improves our own optics on a page.

The operating work travels either way

Commercial help, the service bench and the board seat do not switch off because somebody else priced the round. A co-investment gets the same wrap a led position gets.

One diligence file, shared honestly

Where a co-investor wants our work, they get the file and the reservations in it, including the parts that argue against the deal. A diligence pack that only argues one way is marketing.

01Who we partner with Sector specialists, strategic investors already inside the category, family offices holding a long position, and the existing syndicate around a company we want to back.

02What we bring to a syndicate The operating wrap, the clinical and transactional bench, and a written view of the company that the rest of the table can argue with.

03What we ask for Information rights that let us be useful, a governance seat where the position warrants one, and a straight conversation when something goes wrong.

Three engineers in lab coats inspecting the control cabinet of an automated assembly cell during technical diligence. — Technical diligence taken on the line itself. The operating read is made where the product is built, not from a data room.

§ 05 / 05

Readiness analysis

When the answer is no, the work still goes back to the company.

Most of the companies we meet are not ready for the round they are raising, and a decline is usually a statement about timing rather than about the science. When we pass, we hand back what we built while we were deciding: a written readiness investment analysis of what we saw, what would have to be true for the answer to change, and the order we would work on it in.

What the analysis contains

The company as we read it, set out in plain terms: the commercial gap, the evidence gap and the operating gap, each with the reason it matters to the next investor who looks. Where we were wrong or short of information, we say so rather than leaving it out.

What it is not

Non-binding and suggestive. It is not a term sheet, not a valuation, not a commitment to look again, and it puts no condition on the company or on us. Nobody signs it, and the company is free to use it, argue with it or ignore it.

When it goes out

With the decision, not weeks after it. A founder who hears a clear no with the reasoning attached can act on it in the same quarter, which is the only version of a no that is worth anything to them.

It is part of the body of work, not a courtesy. We leave people better than we found them.

The readiness investment analysis is prepared for companies we decline. It carries no obligation on either side and creates no relationship between the company and the fund.

Contact

Ask a partner a direct question, and get a direct answer back.

About the firm