Today, we have the privilege of speaking with Kyle Sherrill, a dedicated advocate for healthtech innovation and a key member of Nina Capital.
As an investor at Nina Capital, Kyle specializes in investing in early-stage ventures that are shaping the future of healthcare. Based in Barcelona, Kyle and his team operate on a global scale, with a strong focus on Europe, the US, Canada, the UK, Israel, and other key markets. The team’s distinctive combination of expertise—spanning science, engineering, and business—combined with their experience as successful entrepreneurs, equips them to deeply analyze technologies while remaining acutely aware of the practical challenges founders encounter as they grow.
Kyle brings a wealth of experience to his role, having worked across the pharmaceutical sector, early-stage digital health startups, consulting, and open innovation. This diverse background provides him with a comprehensive understanding of the healthcare ecosystem. His core areas of interest include cardiometabolic health, AI-driven healthcare technologies, and innovative solutions for care delivery and patient adherence.
Through his work at Nina Capital, Kyle is committed to aligning groundbreaking technologies with market needs, empowering visionary founders, and driving meaningful and lasting transformation in the healthtech industry.
Tell us more about yourself
Kyle: Hi there, I’m Kyle and I have the pleasure of working with nina capital, investing in early-stage healthtech ventures. We’re based out of Barcelona but invest equally across Europe, the US and other key markets (Canada, UK, Israel, etc). Pretty much everyone on the team, myself included, has some mix of science/engineering + business background. About half of the team has started their own business, a few successful exits included. This means, we are privileged to have the capacity to dive deep on the technology while keeping our feet on the ground about what types of challenges founders will face as they grow their business.
Personally I’ve spent some time working in pharma, early-stage digital health startups, consulting, and open innovation. I’ll spare you the long version of the story, but I have a special interest in the cardiometabolic space, AI/tech in healthcare, and novel care delivery/patient adherence solutions.
What do you usually want to see in a startup before you decide to look into it further?
Kyle: A sharply defined need with an innovative solution and aligned stakeholder incentives. This may sound obvious, but we often find startups pitching that they are going to ‘fix’ healthcare with their all-in-one platform. A bit of an exaggeration here but Nina Capital was born out of the Stanford Biodesign process which provides a good explanation of how we think about need-driven innovation. Sometimes it’s technology, sometimes it’s the business model but it needs to make sense in the context of the problem space and address the needs of the involved stakeholders. We see lots of great solutions that often address one side of the stakeholder matrix (e.g. patients/payors) but fail to address how they’re going to get buy-in from healthcare providers or administrators. The best startups have a deep understanding of what their customers and users care about and how they will address these needs.
Which sections of the pitch deck do you pay more attention to?
Kyle: Two parts of the pitch deck always catch my eye. First is the market sizing. To me, this is a section that allows you to elucidate how well you understand your customer and implicitly your go-to-market strategy. While it’s important to have a minimally large market size, I typically don’t care if your TAM is 5B, 10B, 15B. Instead, what really stands out to me is if you’ve segmented and calculated (at least a first-order attempt) a bottom-up market sizing. This ties directly back to the fact that you understand the need you're solving, what customers you’ll approach first, and what the first contracts might look like.
The second part is the team. For early-stage companies, the roadmap is long and we place extra emphasis on high quality teams. In some context, this might mean the founder comes from the industry and/or has previously founded a company. But don’t fear. You don’t have to be a 2x healthtech founder with a big exit on the resume to get our interest. We equally value founders who recognize their weakness and fill out their management or advisory teams appropriately. Don’t have any experience selling into insurance? Get an expert advisor on the board. Are you a technical founder without any business background? No worries; find yourself a co-founder who’s been around the block once or twice. We’ve made plenty of investments into ‘non-traditional’ founders who are smart about their weak spots and have made efforts to fill these out. As a bonus, once we invest, Nina Capital opens our network to help you continue filling out your roster with the right people.
How did you get into this investment sector?
Kyle: I’ve been in the healthcare space for almost 10 years, across a variety of different companies, roles, and missions. I’ve always found this space compelling because it’s complicated, impactful, and dynamic. Despite some of the (inevitable) naysaying around digital health, I’m incredibly bullish on this sector as one of the best places you can be building a company right now. The opportunity space is enormous with the technology and regulatory environments finally aligned (enough) to show real outcomes in the field. The human body is one of the most complicated things around and trying to treat a bunch of them at population-level scales is even harder; unfortunately we are hardly rational economic actors, and somehow even less rational when it comes to our health. But data/technology is good at illuminating these knowledge and adherence gaps in ways that weren’t possible only decades before.
ML/AI/LLM comes at an interesting time. Unlike many other industries, you can’t just slap technology on the front/back end and try it out. Because of ethical/moral, privacy, security reasons, you need to be extra careful when designing new technologies and products. While this may sound limiting, it actually means you have to be smarter and more creative about how you can solve problems. On top of all of this, building a healthtech company means you get to meaningfully impact the lives of others in a way that matters – no offense to all the e-commerce/ widget companies out there!
What is the most interesting aspect of your job?
Kyle: By far, working with all the amazing founders and investors in this space. As we’re focused on early-stage, we get to see some really great innovations at their most nascent and watch the founders navigate all the harsh realities of the real world to actualize their vision. Sometimes the end result looks a bit different from the original dream, but that’s okay! At Nina Capital, we are privileged to work with the founders to help them through the quagmire of starting a company, building a product, and successfully commercializing it into the market. With more than half of the Nina team as former operators themselves, we feel our biggest value-add is being able to be an active part of the innovation journey that the founders are going through. This can take very different forms: active board participation, individual coaching, market/competitive intelligence, fundraising support, CXO search and evaluation, advisor/board recommendations, etc. Nina has done all this and more to help our portfolio companies grow and succeed.
What are the top 3 traits that startups should have to be more appealing to investors?
Kyle: (1) Know what information matters most for your business and make sure it’s crystal clear in the pitch deck. Show us why! Why do customers care about this now? Why will patients/providers switch from the competition to your service? Why are you the team to do it? If you’re a SaaS business, this probably means you should focus on metrics. If your core customer is insurance, you need to really highlight customer acquisition and go-to-market. If you have a long runway to regulatory approval, make sure the exit and return multiples are attractive enough for VC. Examples are always better.
Pitch decks often contain an abundance of implicit or inferred information that makes sense from the founders perspective but that isn’t abundantly clear from the outsiders perspective. Sometimes this is a fundamental communication problem, sometimes it’s as simple as formatting. Either way, pick the two things that you think are most differential about your company/tech/team, comb back through your pitch deck and ensure that these are explicitly spelled out. Ask friends to look at the deck and have them tell you what your two biggest value propositions are; this kind of blinded feedback helps understand if the message in your head is really getting through to those less familiar with your company.
(2) Know your VC. At nina capital, we invest exclusively in health technology companies. This means we’re normally pretty decent at understanding broad market trends, mature technologies, etc. Even still, we routinely have companies spend 20% of their pitch time telling us about the broken healthcare system. Yes, we agree it’s a problem, but I’d much prefer to hear more about your product or tech or 6mo go-to-market strategy. Obviously there are some niche sectors or technologies that need extra explaining, but feel free to skip the overly-macro slides during a call. We only have a few precious minutes with founders and want to maximize all the relevant (!) information that we can.
(3) Don’t be afraid to ask again. We encourage startups to reach back out even if we’ve said no once (or twice!) already. At nina capital, we try to be specific on why we’re passing on an investment opportunity; this helps founders understand what our main doubts are and what they can do to change our minds. We don’t hold any prejudice against companies that come back with new milestones, pivoted business models, updated CTO/CMOs, etc. In fact, sometimes it’s a positive signal that the founder is scrappy, tenacious, and driven.
Ηow can startups in the Pre-Seed stage increase their chances of attracting investors’ interest?
Kyle: No doubt, this has been a tough funding environment for almost every industry (perhaps apart from AI specifically). In the healthtech world, we see companies differentiating themselves by being creative about how to build early-stage traction without many resources or funding. Traction doesn’t always mean commercial sales, but perhaps collaborations, partnerships, early-pilots that can be beneficial to both customers and startups. This often helps refind the opportunity space and avoids wasting time on problems that aren’t immediately relevant to end-customers. For investors, it also shows that founders are able to be creative with limited resources and really begin to understand product-market fit. Of course this is easier/harder depending on your customer type but it really helps a company stand out in a crowd, especially at pre-seed and seed stages.
Connect with Kyle on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kysherrill/
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