Mercedes Tuin

Mercedes Tuin is a life sciences and medtech investor based in the Netherlands. She holds an MSc in Biomedical Sciences from Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam and an MBA from Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University (completed around 2009–2010), giving her a combination of scientific depth and commercial training that she has applied across more than a decade of healthcare investing.

For roughly seven years she was at BOM (Brabantse Ontwikkelingsmaatschappij / Brabant Development Agency), the regional development and investment company for the Dutch province of North Brabant, where she rose to lead the Health & Care investment division as Senior Investment Manager / Investment Director for Life Sciences & MedTech. There she headed a team of about six people that built one of the Netherlands' most active health investment portfolios, backing startups and scale-ups developing therapeutics, diagnostics, medical devices and healthcare solutions. She (co-)led more than a dozen early-stage investments in innovative high-growth companies and served on boards of portfolio companies. During her tenure BOM was cited as one of the most active investors in Dutch life sciences.

In September 2025 Tuin left BOM to join HERAN Partners as a Partner. HERAN Partners is a venture capital firm founded in 2020 and headquartered in Antwerp, Belgium, that invests exclusively in life sciences and healthcare innovation. She was recruited to help grow the firm and expand its network, bringing her BOM track record, life-sciences expertise and a complementary European network to HERAN's investment team.

• Invests in life sciences, medtech and digital health — specifically drug-discovery and development enabling technology, medical devices, diagnostics platforms, digital health and integrated care solutions, and lab equipment/services.
• Backs early-stage, product-validated companies: at HERAN the fund targets pre-revenue and early-revenue businesses that have reached first-in-human data or hold a CE mark — it deliberately avoids preclinical-stage and pre-product academic spin-outs, and steers clear of pure biotech/pharma and healthcare-services plays.
• Stage and check: leads or co-leads seed and Series A rounds (initial checks ~€1M–€5M at HERAN; her historical sweet spot was ~€1.5M), with reserves for follow-on into Series B.
• Geography: Western Europe, with emphasis on the Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands), Germany, Switzerland and the Nordics.
• In her own words on why she moved into healthcare investing: *"Healthcare touches every life. Being part of something that improves outcomes and access, while empowering brilliant founders, is both intellectually fulfilling and personally meaningful."*
• She describes herself as both an investor and a mentor to entrepreneurs, focused on the commercialization of innovation, and cites the maxim *"Finding opportunity is really just a matter of believing it's there."*