Jumpstart Nova

Founding Partner Marcus Whitney leads the investment team from Nashville, with Partner Vic Gatto sharing deal-sourcing and portfolio oversight duties. Whitney brings operating experience as a former health-tech founder and a long-standing role inside the Jumpstart Health Investors platform, while Gatto's background spans venture capital at Relevance Capital and operational finance. Investment committee decisions are made jointly, drawing on a network of health system advisors and limited-partner clinical executives who provide domain diligence on healthcare-specific deals.

The firm's sourcing engine is built on deep ties to Southeastern US health systems, academic medical centers, and the HBCU entrepreneurial ecosystem — networks that traditional coastal health-tech funds rarely access at scale. Whitney's board seat on the Nashville Health Care Council and relationships with executives at HCA Healthcare, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and other regional anchor institutions surface pre-institutional companies piloting inside large care-delivery settings. The fund also leverages the broader Jumpstart Health Investors infrastructure, which runs accelerator programs and pre-seed funding vehicles that act as a pipeline for later-stage Nova investments.

Jumpstart Nova is an institutional venture capital fund — not a family office. It raised its inaugural $55 million fund in early 2022 from over 50 limited partners, including pharmaceutical corporations and hospital operators. The firm charges management fees and carried interest on a standard venture model and invests exclusively third-party institutional and corporate capital, with no single-family wealth behind it.

The firm invests primarily at Seed and Series A, with initial check sizes between $500,000 and $2 million. The fund reserves capital for pro-rata follow-ons through Series B, and a targeted raise in early 2024 (public record) expanded capacity for larger follow-on rounds within the existing portfolio. Jumpstart Nova does not write pre-seed checks; that stage is covered by Jumpstart Foundry, a separate vehicle under the same parent platform.

The fund avoids therapeutics, biotech, medical devices, and pharmaceutical development — areas requiring FDA regulatory pathways and clinical trial infrastructure that fall outside its health IT and services mandate. The firm also does not invest in direct-to-consumer wellness apps unconnected to enterprise health-system reimbursement flows or managed-care networks, maintaining a strict focus on B2B and B2B2C models touching clinical or operational workflows.

Both are vehicles under Jumpstart Health Investors, a healthcare-focused investment platform co-founded by Marcus Whitney. Jumpstart Foundry runs pre-seed accelerator programs and writes smaller checks to very early-stage health-tech companies, often before they have enterprise pilot data. Jumpstart Nova picks up where Foundry leaves off, writing Seed and Series A checks into companies that have initial traction — often including graduates of the Foundry program — and carries those positions through Series B.

Jumpstart Nova operates as a for-profit venture fund and does not maintain a dedicated philanthropic vehicle. Marcus Whitney's broader civic work — including founding minority entrepreneurship initiatives in Nashville and his role in community development organizations — is conducted personally and through Jumpstart Health Investors' platform activities, not through the Nova fund's LP capital. The fund's diversity mandate is embedded in its investment strategy rather than in a separate charitable entity.