Jahanara Ali

About

Dr. Jahan Ali is a founder of Octane Ventures, which helps bioscience and health IT companies grow their businesses and meet milestones.

Jahan has spent the last 16 years on various sides of early stage biotechnology commercialization and startups. Most recently, she was the Senior Vice President at the Partnership Fund for New York City Investment Fund, a private economic development fund founded by Henry Kravis, where she managed the fund’s investments in the health care sector. While there, Jahan led the BioAccelerate NYC program, a proof of concept program aimed at funding technologies at academic medical center that could be spun out into companies. Jahan also spearheaded the successful effort and recived $5M from NYS to provide seed stage investments to these companies. Jahan also led the New York Digital Health Accelerator, an innovative program that provided funding and mentorship to early stage companies and connected them to three potential customer to enable pilots at these organizations.

Prior to joining the Partnership Fund, Jahan ran her own firm, Longitude Partners, where her clients included early stage entrepreneurs and not for profit organizations. Prior to that, Jahan was the Director of Technology Transfer at the Hospital for Special Surgery, where she focused on creating product development and licensing agreements in the orthopedic sector. Before that, Jahan was with Mojave Therapeutics, a biotechnology company developing therapeutic vaccines, with heat shock protein delivery technology. Prior to that, Jahan was at Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s Office of Industrial Liaison. Jahan has a Ph.D. from New York University School of Medicine, and did a post doc in the Cohn Steinman laboratory at Rockefeller.

Jahan is an advisor to a number of not for profits, including CityHealthWorks, Springboard Enterprises, ELabNYC and HealthEquity Initiative.