Lisa Robidoux joined F-Prime as Senior Accountant in September 2024. Prior to joining F-Prime, she worked at RSM US LLP for two years, most recently as a Senior Associate in their Assurance practice, where she primarily focused on private clients in the technology and life science industries.
Lisa holds a B.S. in Business Administration with dual concentrations in Accounting and Management from the University of New Hampshire.
Karen joined F-Prime as Director of Human Resources where she is responsible for developing best practices and executing HR strategies that align with F-Prime’s goals. Her role centers on refining the firm’s HR function to deliver top-notch support to F-Prime employees as well as our portfolio companies. Her focus is to attract and retaining top talent, ensuring competitive and equitable compensation, and fostering a culture of continuous learning and professional development.
Prior to F-Prime, Karen served as an HR Business Partner at GMO LLC, where she provided strategic guidance on employee engagement, talent management and workforce planning to the Finance, Investment Product Strategy and Operations teams.
Bobby Gaspar is a Venture Partner with F-Prime based in London. Bobby is a world-renowned scientist and physician and accomplished strategic and organizational leader with more than 25 years of experience in medicine and biotechnology. He is one of the principal scientific founders and current chief executive officer of Orchard Therapeutics, a global gene therapy leader recently acquired by Kyowa Kirin with the goal of accelerating the delivery of new gene therapies to patients around the globe. Bobby has been a pioneer in gene therapy and the evolution of hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) gene therapy technology—including some of the first studies in patients with severe primary immune deficiencies—bringing it from some of the first studies in patients into late-stage clinical trials. His unparalleled expertise and deep relationships with key physicians and treatment centers around the world are integral to Orchard’s efforts to identify patients with metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD) and other severe genetic conditions through targeted disease education, early diagnosis and comprehensive newborn screening.
Bobby was named to the inaugural TIME100 Health list in 2024, recognizing him as one of the world’s most influential individuals impacting human health. In addition to his role at Orchard, Bobby also serves as the chair of the board of directors at Eligo Biosciences, a privately-held biotech company expanding the scope of genetic medicines through gene-editing of the microbiome. He is also a venture partner at F-Prime, a global venture creation and investment firm with $4.5 billion under management.
Bobby is an honorary professor of pediatrics and immunology at the University College London (UCL) Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and has led multiple clinical trials that have shown that gene therapy can successfully correct the genetic defect in immune deficiencies. He studied medicine and surgery at Kings College in London before completing his PhD at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health.
Steve Johnson is a Venture Partner with F-Prime based in Cambridge. He specializes in technology start-ups, investing, mentoring, and managing ambitious technology companies. Steve is committed to purpose-driven organizations, prioritizing customers, disruptive technologies, and impactful contributions to industries and markets. Steve’s background includes leading strategy, M&A, B2B and B2C2B, enterprise software organizations, scaling hyper-growth enterprise companies globally, helping raise over $2B in funding, and participating in the creation of billions in market value for these companies.
Previously, Steve served as the President and COO at Berkshire Grey (BG) the leader in AI and robotics for the supply chain industry. He helped launch the commercial business for them, growing from a couple of customers to tens of customers around the world during his 4.2 year tenure. While there, BG raised a series B, went public in 2021 and was acquired by SoftBank in July 2023 and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank. Before Berkshire Grey Steve was the Chief Commercial Officer of Intelex, a global enterprise software company. Intelex was acquired for $570M in June 2019 by Industrial Scientific.
Prior to joining Intelex, Steve served as President and COO for Vidyard, and CRO for Hootsuite, an enterprise software company now used by over 80% of the Fortune 100 companies. At Hootsuite he managed the growth of the company from 27 people to over 1,000 people around the world.
Earlier in his career, Steve worked for a number of category creating software companies such as CRM, Relational Database management, Total Interaction Management, and other areas. Steve holds an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg Business School with an emphasis in management, marketing, and international business and a B.S. in accounting from Union College.
Nicholas Haining, BM, BCh is a Venture Partner at F-Prime based in the Cambridge office. Nicholas is also the Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Arsenal Biosciences, a cell therapy company based in South San Francisco.
During his time as an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, his lab defined some of the key transcriptional and epigenetic regulators of T cell exhaustion and used in vivo genetic screens to identify immune vulnerabilities of cancer cells in mouse models. Nicholas’ clinical expertise is in hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, and he worked on the bone marrow transplant team at Boston Children’s Hospital for nearly twenty years.
More recently, he served as Vice-President, Discovery Oncology and Immunology at Merck Research Laboratories, where he led a multi-site, multidisciplinary team developing innovative approaches to identify therapies for cancer and immune diseases.
Nicholas was elected into the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and has received the Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering.
As a physician-scientist, immunologist and drug developer, Nicholas received his undergraduate and medical degree from Oxford University, UK. He subsequently completed his medical training in Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Jack Neureuter is a Senior Associate at F-Prime focused on early-stage crypto investments. Prior to joining F-Prime, Jack was an investor at Avon Ventures and a research analyst for Fidelity Digital Assets. Jack’s time as a crypto-focused research analyst has served as a foundation to better understanding the evolving digital asset landscape.
Jack holds a degree in Finance from UMass Amherst. His interest in the crypto space was sparked in 2017 with his initial encounter with Bitcoin.
Bala Varadhan is a Principal at F-Prime focused on early-stage crypto, blockchain, and Web3 investments. Before joining F-Prime, Bala was with Avon Ventures and previously honed his expertise at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), where he specialized in private equity due diligence and growth strategy. Bala’s career also includes roles in private equity and law, which have equipped him with a strong foundation in investment and transactional analysis.
Bala holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, a JD from the Pritzker School of Law, and dual B.A.s in Economics and Liberal Arts from The University of Texas at Austin. His interest in the crypto space began in 2013 with his initial exposure to Bitcoin.
Sachin Patodia is a Partner at F-Prime. Prior to joining F-Prime, Sachin founded Avon Ventures and accumulated nearly two decades of experience at Fidelity’s Asset Management group as a portfolio manager on the equities team. Sachin’s investment expertise began during his early years in product management at various tech startups, providing him with a background in both finance and technology.
Sachin earned an MBA from the Wharton School of Business and holds dual degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, a B.S.E. in Computer Science, and a B.S. in Economics. His passion for emerging technologies sparked his early involvement with Bitcoin in 2014.
Jessica Chen, MD, is a Venture Partner at F-Prime and the Chief Health and Wellness officer of ThriveWell™, an umbrella company committed to promoting health, wellness, and longevity nationwide. Her mission to enhance people’s well span incorporates a holistic, community-based approach to care that moves beyond a typical clinical setting and focuses on purpose, healthy eating, exercise, spirituality, and preventive medicine. She also incorporates her personal experiences into her work. ThriveWell’s MRS Diet, for example, was inspired by Dr. Chen’s approach to feeding her own family. M, mostly plant-based. R, real whole foods. S, stop eating before you are full.
Dr. Chen perfected her holistic approach to care as the Chief Clinical Officer at ChenMed, a nationally recognized full-risk healthcare organization serving more than 200,000 patients across 15 states. At ChenMed, Dr. Chen helped implement a care model that reduced hospitalization by 30 to 50 percent and helped patients live, on average, five to seven years longer than their non-ChenMed counterparts. She then led the company’s clinical, recruitment, onboarding, training, and leadership programs; inspiring new generations of physicians to achieve the same results through a doctor/patient relationship built on trust and influence. Her efforts to achieve a culture of high-quality outcomes were instrumental in ChenMed being named to Fortune Magazine’s 2020 Change the World list, the only healthcare delivery organization so recognized.
Dr. Jessica Chen holds a doctorate degree from the University of Miami and completed her residency in Internal Medicine at UM/Jackson Memorial Hospital. She is actively involved in Nicaragua Medical Missions, a Christian non-profit organization that provides medical assistance to underserved communities in Nicaragua. She is married to her medical school sweetheart, Dr. Gordon Chen, ThriveWell’s Chief Executive Officer. Together, they have four children.
Gordon Chen, MD, is a Venture Partner with F-Prime and the Chief Executive Officer of ThriveWell™, an umbrella company committed to promoting health, wellness, and longevity. The organization employs integrated, holistic offerings through two unique brands that provide concierge-style outcome-based medical care with access to an exclusive facility for motivated adults to maximize their healthspan (BLU By ThriveWell), and a proactive approach to home care that keeps members active, eating right, mentally engaged, and productive (ThriveWell At Home).
Dr. Chen discovered how adults benefit from outcome-based, longevity medicine within a community-based environment that focused on purpose, nutrition, movement, and spirituality when he and his family built out ChenMed, America’s leading primary care provider for older adults. As the organization’s Chief Medical Officer, he helped over 200,000 older adults across 15 states significantly improve their outcomes and gain 5-7 healthier years.
Dr. Chen is also an accomplished author, co-writing “The Calling: A Memoir of Family, Faith and the Future of Healthcare,” which outlines his family’s story and their vision for proactive, transformative care. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, as well as a preventative cardiology expert, Dr. Chen is deeply involved in charitable work, supporting medical missions in Nicaragua and at-risk youth through his family’s non-profit, Youth Impact Center. He is married to his medical school sweetheart, Dr. Jessica Chen, ThriveWell’s Chief Health and Wellness Officer and former Chief Clinical Officer of ChenMed. Together, they have four children.