Annie Weissbach, senior associate, strategic investment at Echo Health Ventures, is one of our top 50 Rising Stars in corporate venturing for 2025.
Annie Weissbach attributes her career and interest in public health to the way she grew up. Born in the US, she spent her formative years in Tokyo, London and Florida, which gave her a chance to observe “how different cultures have different systems, and how different populations respond to these systems”.
After exploring public health opportunities in local government and policy during her Master of Public Health studies, it was the launch of the Apple watch that made her notice the role of the private sector on population health. “The Apple watch changed how people thought about their health on a day-to-day basis, and that is what got me excited. I was always searching for the way to make the biggest impact,” she says.
“Define from the beginning where you as an investor and you as a fund will be disciplined and really maintain an orientation on that definition”
This search took her from Mammosphere, a digital health startup focused on women’s health, a business degree, and a job in healthcare investment banking to her corporate venturing role at Echo Health Ventures.
Echo Health Ventures invests on behalf of four Blue Cross Blue Shield health insurers, in a bid to drive healthcare transformation through focused investing. Some of the team’s recent investments include ThymeCare, a value-based cancer care enabler, and Main Street Health, a healthcare organisation exclusively serving rural America.
Weissbach provides financial and market analysis for both the investment team at Echo and for the portfolio companies.
She says she is fascinated with the ability of financial data to tell a story in healthcare and describes her role as “the best job in the world”. She is particularly excited by “being able to engage with these incredibly motivated entrepreneurs who are genuinely in the business to make an impact”.
To others looking at getting into corporate venturing, she says, “Define from the beginning where you as an investor and you as a fund will be disciplined and really maintain an orientation on that definition. It can evolve, but never have that definition far from your mind.”
See the full list of Rising Stars 2025 here.
