Craig Frances

Craig D. Frances is a Managing Director on the Healthcare & Life Sciences team at Summit Partners, a global growth equity firm founded in 1984 that has raised more than $40 billion across its funds. He works out of the firm's Menlo Park office and has been with Summit since joining as a principal in 2003, focusing his career almost entirely on healthcare and life-sciences investing.

Frances came to investing from medicine rather than finance. He earned a BA in psychology, with honors, from Cornell University, and an MD from Cornell University Medical College, where he was valedictorian and received the Paul Sherlock Prize — a peer-voted award recognizing exceptional integrity and compassion in patient care. He went on to serve as Chief Medical Resident at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Before entering venture/growth investing, he founded and managed three companies, giving him an operator's perspective alongside his clinical training.

Over two decades at Summit, Frances has sat on the boards of numerous healthcare companies and has built a reputation as one of the more prominent physician-investors in the sector. He is a former President of the Healthcare Private Equity Association (HCPEA), has advised the Cornell University Trustees Investment Committee on private equity, and was named one of the "40 Smartest People in Healthcare" by Becker's Hospital Review. He has also appeared as a featured speaker at industry events such as Becker's ASC conference.

• Invests primarily in healthcare & life sciences — provider/physician services, healthcare IT and software, diagnostics and life-science tools, and consumer/veterinary health.
• Targets growth-stage, category-leading businesses rather than seed or early-stage startups: companies with proven business models, demonstrated customer adoption, strong management teams, and a clear path to scale.
• Brings a clinician-operator lens — as a physician and former company founder, he evaluates healthcare businesses on both clinical merit and operational/commercial fundamentals.
• Summit's broader approach emphasizes operational partnership, helping portfolio companies scale, expand into new markets, and pursue value-creation initiatives, frequently steering them toward strategic exits or public listings.