Kevin Esval

Kevin J. Esval founded VelocityHealth Securities in 2000 and continues to lead it as Executive Managing Director and Chief Compliance Officer, maintaining an active role with all clients. VelocityHealth is a boutique investment bank focused exclusively on healthcare, offering mergers & acquisitions advisory (sell-sides, buy-sides, recapitalizations, and fairness opinions), capital-markets advisory for equity and debt, and business-development/strategic-partnership work. Over more than two decades the firm reports having completed 100-plus healthcare-related transactions across biotech, pharma, diagnostics, medical devices, and health IT.

Before founding the firm, Esval was a divisional Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH). As one of the original startup executives of his division, he was instrumental in growing it from $0 to roughly $400 million in revenue by the time of his departure. Earlier in his career he was a top sales executive at Complete Health Services, Inc. — named by Inc. Magazine as one of its "Fastest Growing Private Companies" in 1994 — and spent about five years in sales, financial analysis, and derivatives trading at firms including Rosenthal-Collins Group and R.J. O'Brien, working on the floors of the Chicago Board of Trade and Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Esval holds a BA from Furman University, which he attended on a football scholarship, and also studied internationally in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is a dual citizen of the United States and the Republic of Ireland and holds FINRA Series 24, 79, 7, and 63 licenses. Beyond VelocityHealth, he has served as Managing Partner at Donegal Bio Ventures (life-science investments), sits on the Life Science & Healthcare advisory board of JRG Ventures, and has served on the boards of multiple specialty-pharmaceutical and other healthcare companies.

• Concentrates entirely on the healthcare vertical — specialty pharma and generics, drug delivery, biotech, diagnostics, medical devices, healthcare services, HCIT, and distribution.
• Works with growth-oriented companies needing capital raising ($5M–$200M equity/debt) or full M&A execution ($5M–$500M enterprise value), meaning he tends to engage where there is a clear path to a financing or liquidity event.
• Brings an operator's lens (former UnitedHealth divisional COO/SVP) plus deep transactional experience negotiating and structuring mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, licensings, and mezzanine/debt financings.
• Draws on an international network (European, Indian, Asian, and emerging-market clients), useful for cross-border partnering and capital.