Halle Tecco

Halle Tecco is one of the pioneers of digital-health investing. She founded Rock Health in 2010 while an MBA student at Harvard Business School, building it into the first seed-stage venture fund focused exclusively on digital-health startups, and served as its CEO until May 2016. Before Rock Health she founded the nonprofit Yoga Bear (2006), which connected cancer patients with yoga classes, and co-founded Techammer (2007). She holds a BS from Case Western Reserve University, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and an MPH from Johns Hopkins University, where she concentrated in Women's and Reproductive Health.

After Rock Health, Tecco founded Natalist in 2019, a direct-to-consumer fertility and prenatal-products brand, which was acquired by Everly Health in October 2021. She later co-founded and chairs the board of Cofertility, a fertility and egg-freezing company (founded 2022, board chair). She has been investing in healthcare since 2010 as an angel, LP, and fund founder, backing roughly 54 companies over 15 years before pausing active angel investing in 2024.

Tecco is also a prominent educator and commentator. Since 2015 she has been an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School, where she created and teaches the first MBA-level course on digital-health investing, and she joined Harvard Medical School as a course director in 2024. She hosts the *Heart of Healthcare* podcast, writes a widely read newsletter/blog on healthtech and investing, and published a book with Columbia University Press (2026). She has been recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Digital Health (2013), as a Goldman Sachs Most Intriguing Entrepreneur (2013), and among the San Francisco Chronicle's Most Powerful Women in Technology (2014). She is married to Jeff Hammerbacher, co-founder of Cloudera.

• Invest where you have domain depth. Tecco explicitly credits her healthcare focus for her portfolio's performance: "it helps to invest in a domain you know a lot about," noting "investors see higher returns in companies where they have high industry expertise," mainly because expertise enables sharper due diligence.
• Historically pre-seed / seed angel checks into digital-health and consumer-health startups; she was not deploying institutional Rock Health capital as an angel but investing personally (often alongside her husband).
• Sector concentration in healthcare: value-based care, women's health and fertility, mental health, cardiology, kidney care, pharmacy, and diagnostics.
• "Depth over breadth" pivot. After concluding that a broad angel portfolio prevented meaningful founder relationships and didn't justify the risk/time, she moved to fewer, deeper commitments — board roles at growth-stage companies and LP positions in select VC funds.
• Now later-stage via Giant Ventures, where she serves as a Board Partner focused on Series B+ companies, and as an LP in funds including Coalition, Oak HC/FT, Seven Seven Six, and Union Square Ventures.