Our Team - California Health Care Foundation

Staff

Melissa Buckley

Director, Innovation Fund

Melissa Buckley is director of the CHCF Innovation Fund. Melissa leads the foundation’s efforts to bring health care payers and providers together with entrepreneurs and investors in order to solve important problems in the safety-net delivery system.

Vanessa Villaverde

Senior Program Investment Officer

Vanessa Villaverde is a senior program investment officer for the CHCF Innovation Fund, where she invests in companies that improve access to care and promote health equity through virtual and culturally responsive care.

Stella Tran

Senior Program Investment Officer

Stella Tran is a senior program investment officer with the CHCF Innovation Fund, where she invests in early- and growth-stage health companies that enable access to care, improve quality of care, and promote health equity.

Hilda Martinez

Senior Communications Officer, Innovation Fund

Hilda Martinez is the senior communications officer for the CHCF Innovation Fund. She also leads CHCF’s communications efforts on telehealth.

Janet Boachie

Health Equity Fellow, Impact Investing

Janet Boachie is a health equity fellow at the California Health Care Foundation, where she works with the CHCF Innovation Fund to expand its investment strategy to include seed-stage companies, where traditionally underrepresented entrepreneurs face disparities in access to funding.

James Precour

Program Associate, Innovation Fund

James Precour is a program associate for the CHCF Innovation Fund.

Advisers

Ambar Bhattacharyya

Managing Director, Maverick Ventures

Ambar Bhattacharyya is a managing director at Maverick Ventures, a $400 million venture capital fund based in San Francisco. He currently sits on the board of directors of Artemis Health, Docent Health, Centivo, and Cityblock Health, and serves as a board observer at Collective Medical Technologies and hims. He was previously a board observer at Homology Medicines.

Brian Chee

Managing Partner, Polaris Partners

Brian Chee is managing partner at Polaris Partners, a $5 billion private investment firm focused on venture capital investments in health care and technology.

Martin Felsenthal

Partner, Health Velocity Capital

Martin Felsenthal is a venture capital and growth-stage investor who has focused exclusively on investing in and working with innovative health care services and health care software companies since 1992. He has provided capital to a number of companies that helped create new industries in health care and to companies that became market leaders.

Chris Grant

Senior Vice President, Kaiser Permanente & KP Ventures

Chris Grant is chief operating officer and executive vice president for Kaiser Permanente, The Permanente Federation LLC and serves as a member of the senior executive management team. Grant supports the work of nearly 23,000 physicians and 80,000 employees across the Permanente Medical Groups, which provide care to 12.3 million Kaiser Permanente members.

Tuoyo Louis

Cofounder and Managing Partner, Seae Ventures

Tuoyo Louis, MBA, cofounder and managing partner of Seae Ventures, is a venture capital investor with more than 20 years of finance and investment experience who has a deep commitment to health care, entrepreneurship and innovation. He currently invests in health care and financial technology companies founded by women and by those who identify as Black, Indigenous, and other people of color.