Katleen Vandersmissen

Katleen Vandersmissen is a co-founder and Managing Partner of HERAN Partners, a Belgian healthtech-focused venture capital firm based in Antwerp. She holds a PhD in Chemistry and began her career in industry, heading one of the R&D and quality-assurance labs at Umicore, the Belgian materials-technology group. She subsequently moved into strategy consulting at McKinsey & Company, where she focused on strategy and M&A work.

Before co-founding HERAN, Katleen spent roughly seven years at the Belgian institutional investor LRM, where she served as investment manager and head of the Health & Care department. That role gave her deep, hands-on exposure to the life-sciences start-up and scale-up ecosystem and formed the foundation for her transition into dedicated healthcare venture investing.

In 2020 she co-founded HERAN Partners alongside Annie Vereecken, Joris Mortelmans, and Herman Verrelst, with a mandate centered on MedTech and digital health. At HERAN she is responsible for the firm's general management and long-term strategy, fundraising, final investment decisions, and oversight of several portfolio companies. HERAN's first fund closed at €75.5 million and backed 15 companies across Belgium, the Netherlands, and the UK; in February 2026 the firm announced a €90 million first close of its second fund (HERAN HealthTech Fund II), targeting €110–120 million.

• Stage & ticket: Invests primarily at Seed and Series A, with tickets of up to ~€5 million per early-stage company.
• Sector conviction: Concentrated bet on European healthtech and medtech — diagnostics, medical imaging and AI, drug-discovery technology, surgical tech, women's health, and healthcare data/real-world-evidence platforms.
• Team-first: Repeatedly emphasizes backing "a strong team with scientific and entrepreneurial expertise," and seeks founders who are "tough, intelligent, perseverant and possess high levels of genuine positivity."
• Real-world impact over data accumulation: On Fund II she framed the thesis as: *"Technology should support clinicians and researchers — not overload them"* — favoring solutions that generate better healthcare insight and are implementable in real clinical settings, spanning software, hardware, and services.
• Relationship-driven: Stresses that "personal relationships in venture capital" are crucial; HERAN builds reach across Europe through syndication, co-investment partnerships, and industry conferences.
• Personal mantra: Quotes Edison — *"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."*