Coyote Ventures bets on the gaps in care

Jessica Karr’s route to healthcare investing ran through a hamburger. As employee number 12 at Impossible Foods, she spent more than six years helping develop and launch the Impossible Burger. That background makes her an unusual person to ask about fertility financing or care navigation. It also supplies a useful clue. A scientific idea becomes a business only when somebody figures out how people will actually use it.

Karr co-founded Coyote Ventures with Brittany Barreto in 2021. Today, the firm’s public team page lists Karr as general partner, surrounded by clinicians, investors and health technology operators. Its central question is straightforward: where does an available healthcare solution stop being an accessible one?

The obstacle may be outside the clinic

Consider Sunfish, a Coyote portfolio company. Fertility treatment can be available, medically appropriate and completely beyond a family’s financial reach. Sunfish approaches that problem with financing, financial guidance and provider relationships. In its December 2023 investment explanation, Coyote described IVF cycles often exceeding $20,000. That historical estimate explains the investment logic: improving access can require changing how care is paid for.

Now consider Alvee. Its work concerns the nonmedical circumstances that affect whether care succeeds, including food, housing and transportation barriers. The company builds tools for healthcare organizations to identify those obstacles and act on them within existing electronic health records. A referral has limited value if nobody knows whether the patient reached the service. The operational detail is the opportunity.

Or take Koda Health, which combines digital advance care planning with human navigation. Its tools help patients document their wishes and make those preferences available to care teams. Here, the missing piece is a conversation, followed by documentation that can travel through the system. These businesses occupy different categories. Coyote reads them as related access problems.

A wider definition of women’s health

Coyote began with women’s health and wellness, including subjects investors have often treated awkwardly: menstruation, sexual wellness and menopause. Its early portfolio included Flex, Maude and Wile. By 2025, the firm explicitly described a wider investment lens encompassing structural, social and systemic drivers of health.

That evolution matters. A woman caring for an aging parent does not experience caregiving as a separate universe from her own health. Family finances, work and medical decisions overlap. Coyote’s thesis follows those connections into healthcare infrastructure and financial access. The firm itself says the FemTech label is narrower than its investment scope.

“We do not have a specific mandate to invest in female founders”Coyote Ventures, investment FAQ

Its reported portfolio composition is nevertheless striking: 95% female-led in the 2025 impact summary. That is a description of the portfolio, rather than an eligibility rule. The distinction gives founders a clearer reading of the firm than a demographic shorthand would.

The buyer gets a vote

The machinery underneath this mission is venture capital. Limited partners provide investment capital; Coyote backs companies seeking growth and financial returns. Bank of America became its largest institutional Fund I investor in 2022, joining earlier backers The Case for Her and Tripple Family Office.

A 2022 fundraising filing recorded $1.62 million sold at that point. That number is a dated fundraising snapshot. A later Consumer VC interview introduced Karr’s first fund as $10 million. Neither figure should be casually turned into current assets under management, company revenue or a budget for delivering healthcare.

The firm’s investment criteria bring the commercial demands into focus. For seed companies, it generally expects a minimum viable product and enterprise traction, such as a pilot or contract. It wants founders who understand buyers and communities, clinical evidence and measurable impact. Its stated ambition includes businesses capable of reaching more than $100 million in revenue.

For an entrepreneur, the useful lesson is to identify who signs the contract early. Coyote’s published payer discussions distinguish provider contracts, which reimburse billable medical services, from vendor arrangements, which permit different payment structures but can take longer. An elegant app cannot settle that distinction by itself.

The pilot can become the waiting room

Those same discussions contain an unusually practical warning: avoid an endless succession of pilots. A founder can demonstrate usefulness repeatedly without securing a durable customer. The panel’s advice was to pitch a real contract, find internal sponsors and make the buyer’s next steps clear. It also cautioned against complicated shared-savings arrangements and promises the startup cannot deliver.

This approach asks a lot of a young company. Clinical usefulness, adoption and payment have to line up. A product that creates another dashboard, lacks a committed buyer or cannot demonstrate value faces difficulties even when the underlying need is obvious. The first fragile connection may be between a promising trial and a purchasing decision.

Count the reach. Keep the questions.

Coyote’s 2025 impact summary reports 19 portfolio companies collectively serving more than one million patients and generating over $250 million in revenue. Those are firm-reported portfolio totals. They describe the companies’ reach and commercial activity; they do not establish Coyote’s own revenue or its investment returns.

The investment map continues to widen. In May 2026, Coyote explained its backing of medical interpretation business Opalite Health. In August, it published its rationale for Kiara Health, which combines reproductive health information and personalized guidance. The two investments return to the same question: what prevents useful care from reaching someone?

For founders, Coyote offers a possible source of capital and a network familiar with healthcare’s buying habits. For everyone else, it offers a useful way to inspect a broken experience. Follow the patient beyond the appointment. Look for the bill, the handoff, the language barrier. Sometimes the business worth building lives there.