Seed Healthcare is excited to announce that Darshan Prabhu, a distinguished investor, healthcare strategist, and global thought leader, has joined Seed Healthcare as a new member of our Advisory Board and Investment Committee.

With a robust career that includes founding a Global Single Family Office focused on early-stage investing, serving in key roles at a variety of healthcare, investment, and investment banking firms, Darshan brings a wealth of experience and a dedication to advancing healthcare innovation. His commitment to strategic growth, value creation, and healthcare transformation aligns perfectly with Seed Healthcare’s mission to disrupt the industry, promote early detection, and drive down healthcare costs.

We recently sat down with Darshan to discuss his insights on joining Seed, the evolving landscape of healthcare investment, and how his diverse background will influence his role with Seed moving forward.

How did your early experiences, such as your time at UBS and Michelin, shape your approach to investing?

Learning and appreciating that the most successful investors get into the details on the operations side before drawing conclusions around a business or an industry. Far too many investors fail to understand that what makes sense on a spreadsheet doesn’t always translate into reality when you have teams of people bringing the idea or concept to life. Having had the opportunity to work in operations (initially as an engineer, and subsequently as an operations leader managing a P&L at Michelin) has taught me to approach forecasting with manageable expectations and empowering teams to realistically plan for scaling businesses. My time at UBS enabled me to see a wide array of approaches to growing / scaling businesses and more importantly internalize lessons learned from good (and sometimes bad outcomes).

What lessons did you take away from your time investing in healthcare at Whistler Capital Partners?

Backing Founders and CEOs and helping them scale their businesses is an exciting and more importantly rewarding endeavor. The unbridled energy, talent and innovation that some of these brilliant folks bring to the table are probably the best attributes one can wish for. Capital is a commodity, and ideas are only as good as the leaders empowered to execute on good ideas. As an investor, you have a strong responsibility and fiduciary duty to deliver the best possible outcome to your shareholders in the most ethical, aligned, and expedient way – sometimes we all see opportunities that miss out on some (or all) of these elements. Having the discipline to walk away is extremely important.

How have your Board roles at various leading healthcare organizations given your insight into the opportunities and challenges facing the healthcare industry today?

The healthcare industry has been very slow to embrace technology to drive transformative change, and this is largely due to the regulatory nature of the industry. This presents a sizeable opportunity for the industry and us. The tide is turning, and many growth players are increasingly leveraging data, talent, AI-driven process optimization tools to significantly improve upon how care is delivered and consumed. Challenges with staffing and clinical labor are deeply embedded across a variety of healthcare businesses. The $4.5T healthcare industry today is still (unfortunately) focused on solving sickness vs deploying capital and resources into preventative measures and healthy practices. The industry today does not have the right incentives in place to align interests across payors-providers-patients-investors but is increasingly coming to the realization that the best way to make a favorable impact is to align these interests towards a common goal. Prioritizing the patient/consumer vs other constituents inevitably lead to the appropriate characteristics we need in the industry for long-term growth. Representing almost 20% of the spend of US GDP, the healthcare opportunity is a sizeable one that I am tremendously excited about.

What inspired you to make a shift towards private capital investing through your global Single-Family Office that you established this year?

Having worked with two buyout-focused funds in healthcare, I have come to appreciate that some of the most exciting investment opportunities tend to be at the lower middle market and growth equity end of the spectrum. The family I am teaming up with to start this Single-Family Office has a similar background in venture and private equity funds and share my view that private capital has a unique opportunity to drive substantial impact, opportunity and returns through partnering with entrepreneurs / CEOs operating at the growth end of the spectrum. This new effort is going to be a global effort where large pools of capital outside of the US continue to chase innovative, transformative investment funds like Seed Healthcare. I strongly believe that this demand for innovative investors and leaders will continue to drive interest over the coming decades.

What would you say is your investment philosophy?

Our greatest success has come from pursuing value investing and contrarian opportunities. Far too often, investors associate premium transaction multiples with better businesses or end markets – I don’t believe there is a correlation between these two and in fact have seen greater success and returns backing rockstar teams with a simple approach to solving pain points for the market. I’ve always held the view that it is always better to back a rock-star team in a moderately growing end market than an average team in a high-flying, fast-growing end market. Great leadership teams make or break opportunities so backing the right teams in end markets that have upside and are underpriced often present the greatest returns to investor capital. This approach does require a significant amount of industry research and fundamental analysis but almost always leads to better outcomes.

What excites you most about the current trends in healthcare, particularly in areas like early disease detection and technology-driven innovations?

Not to state the obvious, but we have just begun to scratch the surface on what role large-language-models and AI algorithms will play in enabling healthcare to pivot more to preventative vs reactive measures. Finding the right balance and place for technology and AI to play in a very human and clinically-oriented industry is probably one of the most important challenges we will face, but also presents the greatest opportunity to drive seismic transformation given the limited role technology has played thus far. We are working to solve disease detection problems across populations globally. The magnitude of the problem is gargantuan and being able to solve it in one region or geography presents phenomenal scaling opportunities around the world.

What drew you to joining the Advisory Board and Investment Committee at Seed Healthcare?

Having the opportunity to get to know Todd and his philosophy around healthcare transformation was the candidly what convinced me. We share a lot of common views around how to drive impact in this industry and have both been at it for several decades. Simply being a part of the Seed Healthcare effort and bring hopefully one more perspective to the table is something I look forward to. This team is going to do fantastic things and I am honored to be a part of it.

What do you believe is the biggest opportunity for Seed as it seeks to disrupt healthcare through its unique focus on supporting disruptive healthcare technologies?

There is likely going to be significant bipartisan support for companies (and by extension, their Investors) that focus on backing models focused on prevention vs maintenance and disease management. Seed’s unique focus on early identification, detection and preventative care is what our healthcare system needs and is the only way we will be able to bend the cost curve on ~20% of US GDP. Additionally, embracing and leveraging technology to drive transformation is no longer a nice-to-have but a must-have as part of addressing various systemic needs. The Seed Healthcare team acutely understands this and are leading the way to back businesses and leaders who are on the front end of this transformation curve. Businesses asleep at the wheel (or resistant to change) will inevitably be leapfrogged in a short span of time.