Veteran healthcare information technology executive Todd Cozzens has been named managing director of Leerink Capital Partners, an asset management affiliate of Leerink Partners, a Boston-based investment bank specializing in healthcare.
Cozzens will manage the firm's healthcare technology, services and digital healthcare investment initiative. He recently served as venture partner and senior adviser to Sequoia Capital, Menlo Park, Calif., a noted technology investment firm.
Cozzens is perhaps best known in the health IT industry as a co-founder and CEO of Picis, a developer of specialty electronic health-record systems for use in high-acuity hospital settings such as emergency rooms, intensive-care units and surgery departments. Picis was acquired in 2010 by Ingenix, the healthcare IT division of UnitedHealth Group now called Optum. Cozzens stayed on and led the accountable care business solutions group.
Cozzens said he's not cutting ties with Sequoia, dubbed by Forbes as “Silicon Valley's Innovation Factory,” whose reputation was made by early bets on the future success of Apple, Google and other companies that later became IT industry powerhouses. Sequoia has continued its winning ways with more recent investments in Airbnb and Dropbox.
“Sequoia is the greatest investment firm on the planet,” Cozzens said. “We built four billion-dollar companies while I was there.” he said, noting just this week that Dr. Cameron Powell and Trey Moore, co-founders of healthcare IT developer AirStrip, a Sequoia portfolio company, shared the stage with an Apple exec to demo AirStrip's Apple Watch app at the “Apple Special Event” in San Francisco.
“It's been great, but this is an opportunity for me to run a pure healthcare fund,” with an investment firm that has its own enviable record in the healthcare industry, he said.
