Gini Deshpande

Gini Deshpande, PhD is a Venture Partner at Cathay Health, part of Cathay Capital’s global cross border platform focused on investing at the convergence of healthcare, life sciences and technology. She has over 20 years of experience creating new products and launching companies across a number of sectors in life sciences. As founder and CEO of NuMedii, she pioneered the field of AI driven drug discovery and led all aspects of company creation, including building the team and advisory board, structuring critical partnerships with pharmaceutical partners and raising the initial rounds of financing. In previous roles, Gini helped early-stage companies Iperian and CollabRx identify optimal markets and raise over $25M as well as being responsible for new product opportunities for life sciences tools market leader Affymetrix’s Academic Business Unit, their largest customer segment. During her time at Children’s Hospital Boston (CHB) as Director of the early-stage incubation business unit, Gini secured grant funding to enable prototype development for six medical device products as well as helping launch several startups in the therapeutics and diagnostics space through collaborations with faculty. She has managed broad, diverse IP portfolios, closed licensing deals worth several million dollars and is an angel investor in companies at the intersection of technology and healthcare. Having co-authored numerous papers, Gini is the recipient of several awards, is a frequent speaker at industry conferences on AI in Healthcare and has served on the Advisory Committee of the BIO Investor Forum for many years. She is an active advocate for increasing the participation of women in STEM and entrepreneurship and has given talks at the United Nations on this topic. Gini received her PhD in Biological Sciences from Purdue University and did post-doctoral work at Harvard Medical School.