HealthQuest Seeks Start-Ups That Hit Health Care’s Bottom Line

Garheng Kong, MD, PhD, managing director of HealthQuest Capital, says the firm’s genesis grew from a look at the numbers. By his account, over 60% of the venture dollars poured into health care go to biopharmaceutical companies, but drugs only account for 9% of the health care dollars spent. What about the other 91%? “We believed that there was an opportunity,” says Kong, a one-time partner at Sofinnova Ventures, one of the more successful biopharma investors out there. “That was the actually genesis of HealthQuest, to build a firm focused on health care innovation that is about value optimization, not limited to a certain subsector.”

In this conversation with START-UP, Kong lays out how HealthQuest – which raised a $225 million fund this year –...