Gayle Kuokka

With a long history of working with medical startups, Gayle has more than 30 years of diverse experience in a variety of senior management roles that include finance, accounting, human resources, manufacturing and operations. After stints at other technology companies, she found that medtech’s mission to help patients mirrored her own philosophy and was more personally rewarding. Perhaps an enigma for an expert in finance, Gayle’s regard for financial return, while understanding its importance, is far outweighed by her devotion to advancing human health and making the world a better place.

She has had the opportunity to work across several sectors in medtech (e.g, medical devices, drug discovery, diagnostics, instrumentation), including serving as chief financial officer for Biodesy (now Blue Light Therapeutics) which commercialized a tool for drug discovery. She also was the vice president of finance at Isostent, a radioisotope stent which was acquired by Cordis, a Johnson & Johnson company, and the chief financial officer at Radiant Medical, which induced local hypothermia in heart attack patients to preserve heart tissue.

She later started her own company offering chief financial officer consulting to more than 15 life science startup companies. In total, she has been responsible for helping raise more than $200 million in venture funding.

She received her MBA from the Tepper School at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and her BA in economics, magna cum laude, from the University of Washington in Seattle.