AHA Ventures, the investment arm of the American Heart Association is taking an expansive approach to corporate venture investment. Rather than narrowing its investment strategy around a single mandate, it is expanding across several funds, structures and stages of healthcare innovation.
The Texas-based nonprofit cardiac care organisation began in 2018 by setting up Cardeation, a $30m medical device fund developed created in partnership with co-investors Philips and UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) to support healthcare innovation in heart disease and stroke care, and managed by Aphelion Capital. It has since added three more funds, including a venture incubator, Studio Red. (Read the full profile of Studio Red in our 2025 Venture Building report). Another fund is in development.
The logic is straightforward. Heart and brain health are among healthcare’s largest unmet challenges, but there is no single technology or business model capable of addressing them.
“We are finding that you need many shots on goal and to come at it in different ways to make an impact,” says Lisa Suennen, managing partner at AHA Ventures.
That breadth is also an attempt to reconcile two measures that often sit uneasily inside mission-driven investment programmes: financial performance and measurable health outcomes.
Impact as an investment discipline
AHA Ventures does not treat impact as a reporting exercise that happens after an investment has been made. It has a dedicated measurement team and creates an impact measurement plan for each portfolio company, tracking health outcomes, proxies for those outcomes and economic effects.
The approach reflects a broader shift in healthcare investing towards measuring “health value” rather than relying solely on conventional financial metrics. AHA Ventures was a founding member of the Capital Impact Council at Duke University’s Margolis Institute for Health Policy, which helped develop a framework for assessing health value creation among investors and companies.
The platform says more than 13m people have already been reached by products and services across its portfolio, although that figure excludes companies whose products have yet to launch. Suennen also points to several exits and companies showing significant growth and sustainability as early evidence that the model is working.
For Suennen, the underlying proposition is not that impact should justify weaker financial returns. It is that the two can reinforce each other when investment decisions are made with both in mind.
“We really don’t see this as a trade-off,” she says. “We believe that great companies can have great impact.”
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