Richard Lipkin

Richard ("Rick") Lipkin is a Managing Director of Easton Capital Investment Group, a New York City–based life sciences and healthcare venture capital firm founded in 2000 that invests across biotechnology, therapeutics, diagnostics, drugs, devices, and healthcare information technology. His career spans venture investing, financial management, and science communication, giving him an unusually technical vantage point on early-stage healthcare deals.

Before and alongside Easton, Lipkin was a partner at Commerce Health Ventures (affiliated with NewSpring Capital), a life sciences and healthcare fund, and at Laird & Company, a private merchant bank. He served as a biotech analyst/consultant for a Goldman Sachs hedge fund and for DARPA, and was Executive Director of the Strang Cancer Prevention Center. Earlier in his career he was Director of International Development at IDT Corporation, where he was involved in the launch of Net2Phone. He also spent years as a science writer and editor for Scientific American and Science News, publishing 400+ articles and earning the American Chemical Society's Grady-Stack Award; he has been listed in Who's Who in Science and Engineering and Men of Achievement.

Lipkin is an honors graduate of Princeton University and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School. He pursued cognitive and computational neuroscience studies at Columbia University and at the Marine Biological Laboratory (Woods Hole, MA), and has served as a Senior Staff Associate at Columbia's Zuckerman Institute for Mind, Brain, and Behavior. He sits on numerous boards, councils, and committees for institutions including the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rockefeller University, Columbia University, the Marine Biological Laboratory, the New York Academy of Sciences, and Montefiore Medical Center.

Beyond Easton, Lipkin is the Co-Founder and Co-Chair (and Co-Manager of the Investment Committee) of the Catalytic Impact Foundation (CIF), founded in 2015, and the Co-Founder and Chairman of Princeton Alumni Angels. He also mentors life sciences and digital health startups at NYU's Endless Frontier Labs.

• Invests in early-stage life science and healthcare companies — pre-seed, seed, and Series A — with a focus on translational science moving toward clinical validation and commercialization.
• Through the Catalytic Impact Foundation, targets the "Valley of Death" funding gap and practices "regenerative philanthropy": an evergreen model where returns are recycled back into the fund (target fund size ~$20M).
• Sector emphasis on therapeutics, biotech, diagnostics, medical devices, and digital health, extending to life-science-adjacent IT.
• Geographic reach across North America, Europe, and Israel.
• Values deep scientific and technical due diligence — his own background in neuroscience, biotech analysis, and science journalism means founders should expect rigorous scrutiny of the underlying science.
• Takes active governance roles (board director / board observer) in companies he backs.