New Investment Firm Launches to Back Healthcare Startups That Have ‘Earned the Right to Scale’

A new healthcare-focused investment firm launched on Tuesday with support from Nueterra Capital. It’s seeking to help startups navigate the jump from product validation to true commercial scale.

The firm, named Fountain Health Partners, is based in Boston and Kansas City. It was co-founded by Joey Campanelli, a former executive at Shields Health Solutions — which was acquired by Walgreens in 2022 — and Jack Euston, a healthcare investment banker with more than a decade of experience in M&A, including eight years in leadership roles at Citizens Capital Markets.

Campanelli said Fountain wants to invest in six to eight startups over the next few years. 

The firm is looking for companies that are past their proof-of-concept phase and are generating steady revenue. Campanelli noted that most of Fountain’s investments will be in startups that are approaching or already at profitability, with a clear three- to five-year path to a strategic exit.

These companies will likely span the categories of workforce solutions, automation, care coordination, member engagement, risk and compliance and new care delivery models, he added.

“These are businesses solving real operating problems inside healthcare — often using software or AI to take cost, friction or labor out of workflows that have historically been manual, fragmented or expensive to run,” Campanelli stated.

Fountain’s job is to figure out which ones have actually “earned the right to scale,” he said.

These typically are companies with repeatable sales patterns, strong customer adoption and buyers that have a clear budget for the product. Campanelli added that Fountain also loves to see founders who are realistic about their weaknesses, saying that self-awareness is often an indicator of a team’s ability to execute and reach scale.

Fountain is focused on companies that sell to health systems, payers and provider groups, with some also serving self-insured employers and other risk-bearing entities. Campanelli said the firm is building a team with deep expertise into what these customers need. For instance, Tampa General Hospital CEO John Couris and WellCare Health Plans CEO Ken Burdick are both on Fountain’s advisory board.

“We have spent years operating inside health systems, specialty pharmacy and payer-adjacent businesses before we founded the firm, so we understand what a pharmacy director, a hospital CFO or a chief medical officer actually cares about when a founder sits across the table from them. That is where we add the most value,” Campanelli declared.

In his eyes, the type of startups that Fountain is zeroing in on — tech-enabled healthcare service companies at the inflection between validation and commercial scale — are genuinely underserved. 

Campanelli pointed out most healthcare investors have never actually operated inside a health system, a payer or specialty pharmacy — instead coming from the finance, consulting or technology world.

“That gap matters because the buyers our portfolio companies sell to are unlike any other enterprise customer,” he noted.

He also highlighted that the market has shifted away from healthcare services companies, with more and more dollars flowing to AI-first platform bets.

This means services businesses haven’t been as popular among investors recently.

“Services businesses with real revenue, real customers and a clear path to profitability are getting less attention than they deserve, even though they are often the companies actually solving the problems that health systems and payers are willing to pay for,” Campanelli said.

The team at Fountain believes that in today’s healthcare market, operational execution matters much more than ambitious storytelling.

Campanelli declined to provide details on the size of the firm’s inaugural fund.

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