Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2017: Tara Butler

Tara Butler, managing director at Ascension Ventures (AV), effectively a multi-corporate-backed fund manager on behalf of care providers, helped close its fourth healthcare venture fund at $255m last month.

She started in corporate venture capital more than 14 years earlier as an investment associate at AV’s first fund and has led the medical device technology investment portfolio.

Then called Ascension Health Ventures, this first fund after the millennium raised $125m from Ascension Health, the US’s largest Catholic and non-profit health system and a subsidiary of Ascension Health Alliance. Subsequent funds were larger and had more limited partners but AV remains a subsidiary of Ascension.

As well as Ascension, the fourth fund, AV CHV IV, has money committed by Adventist Health System, Carle Foundation, Catholic Health Initiatives, CentraCare Health, Children’s Medical Centre of Dallas, Novant Health, OhioHealth and OSF HealthCare. In aggregate, these operate 474 hospitals, have 578,000 employees and generate $88bn in annual revenue.

Butler has been a board member or observer at more than a dozen portfolio companies, including Augmenix, CHF Solutions, Confluent Surgical, HemoSphere, Interventional Spine, ISTO Technologies, MindFrame, Neurolutions, Novasys, OptiScan Biomedical, PathoGenetix and Stereotaxis, but said Ocular Therapeutix and TomoTherapy were two of her biggest successes in terms of investment returns.

TomoTherapy raised $79m from AV and others, including university technology transfer office Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, before raising $222.3m in its initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq stock exchange in May 2007.

Similarly, Ocular Therapeutix raised $68m from investors, including $11m in its series D round in 2011 led by AV, before its July 2014 IPO raised $60.5m after expenses. Ascension, which owned a 12.5% stake in Ocular through its CHV II fund, owned a 9.5% stake post-IPO – the company had a market capitalisation of $228.9m on December 9 after its share price fell by more than three-quarters from March 2015’s high.

But Butler said: “The biggest challenges are always recognising when to pull back from supporting a portfolio company.”

An integral part of AV since 2002, therefore, Butler was promoted to become managing director in 2013.

Butler joined AV after completing a residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Washington University in St Louis and also holds a BSc in economics and an MBA from Wharton School of Business and a doctor of medicine from University of Pennsylvania. Prior to attending medical school, she held positions in business development at Medtronic, in finance at Honeywell and as a laboratory research assistant at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Butler said what attracted her to CVC was it enabled her “to combine my skills and interest in the development and commercialisation of medical technologies with my medical training”.

And added: “My main personal ambition is to invest in and build strong companies in our next fund that advance the standards in medical technology within a value based care environment.”