About Us

History

Perspective

Approach

Blue Ox Healthcare Partners is a private equity firm investing growth capital in commercial-stage healthcare companies. Originally started by Oded Levy with Sheila Schweitzer in 2009, the current team came together with the addition of Charles Kennedy, MD and John Neczesny as Managing Partners in 2017. Today, the firm includes four senior members with diverse backgrounds and extensive experience in the healthcare sector as operators, investors, executives, and private equity professionals. 

Our team has demonstrated a long and substantial track record of accomplishment, each with over 20 years investing in and building healthcare businesses. Since inception, Blue Ox has invested in a range of companies where our extensive professional and healthcare industry expertise can be leveraged to a company’s long-term benefit.  Since 2017 we have led over $200 million of equity investments, including over $85 million invested and committed directly by Blue Ox. We take an active approach to forging partnerships and providing strategic and operational guidance to the companies in which we invest. 

Our perspective comes from years of creating meaningful change in healthcare as specialists in our individual fields. Working together, we view opportunities in ways others don’t, and identify innovations and guide management to solve problems faced all around the industry. 

We have observed that many investment groups understand innovation and are transactional experts yet don’t fully comprehend or account for the change-resistant practice of medicine and the maze of payers and providers. Similarly, innovators steeped in science and technology often underestimate the realities of running a business or the actual needs or uptake in their target markets. Payers and providers look to evolve but aren’t set up to accept or implement new ideas and technologies. Consumers seeking to choose and manage their own healthcare and its costs have little practical way to actually do so. The result is frequent failure to bring difference-making innovations to market and have them embraced to improve the system.

Throughout our decades of experience on all sides of the table, we have seen wide gaps in understanding and implementation among healthcare investors, innovators, and participants. We formed the Blue Ox team because we recognized the opportunity for seasoned investors and executives with a fresh approach to play a pivotal role in catalyzing the industry’s adoption of high value innovations that realize the promise of better healthcare for all. 

We believe innovation centered on the individual is the key to making healthcare more effective and affordable for everyone. We focus on businesses in three core areas – Precision Health, Healthcare Delivery, and Affordability –driving the transformation towards individuality and value-based care, concentrating on those that incorporate technology to create critical advancements. We believe they represent the most powerful forces improving healthcare and offer the best opportunities for growth investment. Blue Ox has the end to end vision to see what’s possible, and the experience and relationships to optimize deployment, reimbursement, and utilization to make it a reality. 

Beyond providing growth capital, we bring companies our collective wealth of strategic, operational and financial markets expertise and the guidance to navigate the often-twisted path from concept to commercialization. We understand firsthand the critical needs and hurdles the industry faces to access innovation and implement change. The combination of our background and approach with our reputation and track record makes Blue Ox a desirable partner to a company’s management and investors, working together to build value and bring fundamental change to healthcare.