Digitalis Ventures invests in solutions to unmet needs in biomedicine and health.
We provide venture capital to early-stage companies across life sciences, health technologies, and animal health, and we support them throughout their development.
Our team's technical, financial, and domain expertise lets us creatively finance, build, and scale enduring enterprises. We work alongside a network built over many years—entrepreneurs, technical experts, research institutions, and financial partners—and those relationships are how early-stage ideas become lasting solutions at scale.
We also write and publish to show the thinking that underpins our investments. This work appears in the Notebook on the Digitalis Group site.
Digitalis Ventures is part of the Digitalis Group, alongside Digitalis Commons, which builds public-interest technology to solve market failures in biomedicine and health, and Digitalis Labs, which designs novel technologies in biomedicine and health.
ABOUT OUR NAME
The Digitalis plant is the natural source of cardioactive steroid glycosides widely used in the treatment of heart disease since the 1700s. Dr. Thomas W. Smith, the father of our founding partner, began his career as a physician-scientist at Harvard by developing a novel radioimmunoassay to enable the safe administration of digitalis. Dr. Smith’s subsequent research program touched on many themes—the health benefits of nature-derived compounds, the importance of measurement science in therapeutic development, rational design in drug discovery, among many others that continue to resonate with our group today. Beyond his research, Dr. Smith was a renowned clinician and beloved mentor to a generation of academic cardiologists. Our name reflects our ongoing commitment to this legacy of both scientific innovation and human connection.
