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.
Ella Schwartz
Senior Program Investment Officer
Ella Schwartz 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.
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.