Coffee & Conversation with Zen Chu
About Guest Speaker
Zen Chu believes that now is the best time in history for healthcare entrepreneurs and engineers to create the tech-enabled products and services to help medicine scale and serve more patients with higher quality at lower cost.
In 2010 he created the MIT Healthcare Ventures graduate courses within the pioneering Health Science & Technology (HST) program, a joint initiative between MIT, Harvard Medical School and the Boston academic hospitals. Healthcare Ventures has been transplanted to Yale Medical School and UCLA. He serves as Faculty Director for the HackingMedicine.MIT.edu & Hacking Medicine Institute health tech innovation initiatives.
Since 2010 HackMed has trained over 10,000 physicians, engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs in over 30 countries, spawning companies which have collectively raised over $2.5B in venture capital and impacted millions of patients.
As Managing Director of AccelMed Ventures, Zen specializes in building early-stage medical technology and healthcare service companies — usually serving as co-founder and first investor while helping raise follow-on funding from top VC funds. AMV’s portfolio spans Boston, Silicon Valley and Asia, including Abridge.ai, PillPack.com (acq by Amazon as cornerstone to their health strategy), NURX.com (acq), Figure1.com (acq), 3D-Matrix Medical (2011 IPO), Aptible.com, PictionHealth, Luminopia, SoFi.com, Curoverse Genomics (acq), PathFinder Regenerative Medicine, BitGym.com (acq), DirectDermatology.com and a few companies still in stealth mode.
Alongside four world-renowned MIT biomaterials professors, Zen co-founded 3D-Matrix Medical Inc., serving as the first CEO for the venture-backed MIT regenerative medicine company whose injectable gel drug delivery products are still treating patients and enabling new regenerative medicine research, with a successful IPO in 2011. He has managed and led new ventures for Harvard Medical School, Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Bioengineering, NetVentures Fund and Hewlett-Packard.
Zen earned a Masters of Public & Private Management from Yale University and a BS in biomedical/electrical engineering from SMU. He's father to three hilarious chemical engineers in Brookline, MA.