Pura Vida Investments

Efrem Kamen founded the firm and serves as the primary portfolio manager. He previously worked at Millennium Management, where he developed the event-driven healthcare specialization that Pura Vida now institutionalizes. The firm's lean analyst team operates with a high degree of scientific literacy, often recruiting M.D.-Ph.D. professionals to support investment decisions.

The firm sources through a combination of primary scientific literature review, attending key medical conferences, and maintaining direct relationships with sell-side healthcare research desks. Given its concentration in binary events like FDA decision dates and clinical-trial readouts, the sourcing process is calendar-driven — the universe is public, but the depth of single-name due diligence is what separates Pura Vida from generalist peer funds.

Pura Vida deploys across both public and private healthcare exposures, though the weighting has historically favored liquid public equities due to the firm's event-driven positioning around regulatory catalysts. Private participation tends to be opportunistic, often in crossover rounds where companies approach an IPO or a pivotal data readout.

The firm runs a concentrated book structured explicitly around binary clinical and regulatory events — a risk profile most generalist multi-manager funds minimize due to position-sizing constraints. Pura Vida's analyst bench, composed of scientifically trained investors, enables due-diligence depth on FDA advisory committee meetings and Phase III data releases that typically requires dedicated buy-side sector specialization.

The firm focuses on therapeutics, medical devices, diagnostics, and life-science tools. Within therapeutics, known positions have included neurology (via Biohaven) and dermatology (via Arcutis Biotherapeutics), suggesting a breadth across both large and orphan-drug indications. The firm does not publicly disclose sectors it avoids.

Pura Vida maintains offices in New York City and North Palm Beach, Florida. The New York presence anchors the firm in the US hedge fund capital with access to sell-side resources and capital introductions, while the Palm Beach office is a common satellite for senior investment professionals in the industry. Beyond this geographic footprint, the firm has not disclosed subsidiary or adjacent vehicles such as a philanthropic foundation.

Pura Vida has not publicly disclosed a formal co-investment program with external GPs. The firm's event-driven healthcare mandate typically involves direct single-name positions rather than joint ventures or club deals, and it does not operate as a fund-of-funds or capital allocator to other hedge funds.