Richard Anders

Richard Anders is a longtime Boston-area entrepreneur, investor, and educator who founded Mass Medical Angels (MA2) — an angel group he created to fill what he saw as a gap in New England: the lack of a dedicated, life-science-centric angel network. He was reportedly frustrated by watching promising biomedical inventions get abandoned for lack of seed capital, and built MA2 to pair money with mentoring from members who include researchers, clinicians, venture capitalists, executives, engineers, bankers, and attorneys. The group was established in the mid-to-late 2000s (roughly 2007–2008).

Anders earned a BA summa cum laude in Mathematics from Harvard University and a JD from Harvard Law School. Earlier in his career he founded Jurisoft, a legal-software company that was acquired by Lexis-Nexis, where he then served as president of the Jurisoft division; he also published technology newspapers. He founded the Science on Screen program (which pairs film screenings with talks by scientists and researchers) and has been active as an angel and seed-stage investor across dozens of early-stage companies, including as a partner at the Still River Fund and founder of the angel group Launchpad.

Alongside MA2, Anders is Managing Director and founder of Rubin/Anders Scientific, Inc., a firm that places scientists and academics as expert witnesses in litigation. He is also a lecturer at MIT, teaching medical device and life-science entrepreneurship (the "Dynamics of the Biomedical Enterprise" course in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology / HST program).

Anders is active in the Boston science and medical community, having served as a trustee of the Museum of Science (Boston) and the Forsyth Institute, and as an overseer of Brigham & Women's Hospital.

• Invests exclusively in life sciences and healthcare — medical devices, therapeutics, diagnostics, digital/health IT, health services, and lab/research tools.
• Backs early / seed-stage companies, joining or leading rounds in the $250K–$3M range; MA2 will fund all or part of a round and frequently syndicates with other angel groups and VCs.
• Seeks companies that are "extremely capital efficient," where a relatively small amount of capital produces a meaningful valuation inflection; the stated goal is roughly a 5x return within ~5 years.
• Leverages the Boston "healthcare supercluster" — deep member relationships across hospitals, universities, and industry provide both deal flow and hands-on mentoring/expertise to portfolio companies.
• Thesis rooted in Anders' founding frustration: too many promising clinical inventions die for lack of seed money, so MA2 exists to provide "money and mentoring" and drive "more clinical innovation for the community."