Jeff Peters’s career asks an awkward question of the tidy résumé: which column should he go in? Engineering offers a plausible answer. So does investing. So does running a company. His present roles complicate matters further. He is the founder and chief executive of evanesce Medical and a venture partner at OrbiMed. A form with a single box for “occupation” would have to negotiate.
The interest lies in how those jobs connect. Peters has examined businesses as an equity analyst, worked on their technology as an executive, managed investments, and taken responsibility as a CEO. Each position gives the company a different outline. A spreadsheet can make a business look orderly. An operating plan has to survive contact with the people who carry it out.
Follow his route and a story emerges about professional education after the degrees have been awarded. The classroom changes: an investment firm, a technology company, a boardroom, a startup. The subject keeps returning. How do you turn an organization’s capabilities into a business that can move forward? Peters’s job history offers several places from which to consider that question.
Two degrees, one Minnesota connection
Peters earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and an MBA from the University of Minnesota. His LinkedIn education entry places his Carlson School of Management studies between 1994 and 1997. Engineering and business make a useful pairing for the career that followed: one concerns how things work; the other concerns the organization and resources around them.
There is no need to turn those qualifications into a personality test. Their significance is practical. Peters’s subsequent titles include chief technology officer, equity research analyst, portfolio manager, and chief executive. The education and the employment history belong in the same picture. The engineering degree did not disappear when finance arrived, and the business degree remained relevant when the work returned to technology leadership.
Minnesota also remains part of the picture. Peters is based in Excelsior. His professional affiliations reach beyond that home city, but the geographic thread is easy to follow: a University of Minnesota education, a Minnesota base, and later appearances at business events in Minneapolis. The local connection gives a sprawling list of organizations a recognizable point of reference.
Reading companies, then working inside them
From 1997 to 2001, Peters worked as an equity research analyst at Dain Rauscher Wessels. That is a role built around studying businesses and explaining an investment case. It precedes the technology leadership chapter at ev3, where the responsibility shifts from examining a company to helping direct its work.
A 2006 ev3 management presentation lists Peters as vice president of research and development for its Cardio Peripheral Division and chief technology officer. His broader ev3 tenure, from 2001 to 2007, also included business development responsibilities. Technology, development, and commercial relationships were all represented in the jobs he held there. The titles themselves place him near the junction between what a company could make and how it might grow.
The management table puts him alongside president and CEO Jim Corbett, chief financial officer Pat Spangler, and other divisional and functional leaders. That is a useful reminder of the setting. A technology executive works within a leadership group whose members have different responsibilities. The organization has to bring those responsibilities into agreement. Even an elegant technical plan eventually acquires a budget and a meeting invitation.
ev3 is now part of Medtronic. For Peters’s story, the relevant chapter is his own six-year span there and the combination of technical and business roles within it. A résumé that labels the period simply “engineering” would lose some of its meaning. Business development is already present before the next move into investment management.
Capital returns to the story
Peters became a portfolio manager at Black River Asset Management in 2007, a position he held through 2008. Between 2009 and 2011, he was an entrepreneur in residence at Foundation Medical Partners. The second title brings the language of company creation into an investment setting. His next executive position made the operating responsibility explicit.
He served as CEO of Anulex Technologies from April 2011 to May 2016. He also worked as an independent consultant between 2013 and December 2017, and was executive chairman of Neurovasc Technologies from December 2015 to May 2017. These dates overlap. The middle of his career looks less like a queue of jobs than a set of responsibilities held alongside one another.
That distinction matters when reading a founder’s biography. A sequence of titles can suggest a person repeatedly closing one door and opening the next. Here, the chronology shows periods of simultaneous executive, advisory, and board work. It is possible to trace the dates without pretending every year belongs to a single institution.
In December 2017, Peters became president and CEO of Cardialen. In January 2018, he became a venture partner at OrbiMed. The following month brought the chairmanship of Xtant Medical’s board, connected to the company’s restructuring. Within a short period, his responsibilities included leading one company, joining an investment firm, and chairing another company’s board. The distinction between investor and operator had become a matter of which role he was performing.
The number and the people around it
In October 2018, Cardialen announced a $17 million Series B financing. RiverVest Venture Partners led the round, with Qiming Venture Partners, HBM Healthcare Investments, and Cultivation Capital participating. It is a concrete milestone in Peters’s CEO tenure, and a particularly useful one because the announcement also records who would join the board.
Jay Schmelter of RiverVest, Christopher Shen of Qiming, and Thomas Thaler of HBM were named as new directors. They would serve alongside Bill Schmidt of Cultivation Capital, independent director Warren Watson, and Peters. The financing therefore had two visible dimensions: additional capital and additional people in the company’s governance.
“We are thrilled to have such a strong syndicate of investors joining the team.”
Jeff Peters, October 2018
The word “team” in Peters’s comment gives the announcement a human scale. An investment round is counted in dollars, but the relationships have names. The press release captures a moment when those names became part of the company’s next chapter. It also places Peters, an executive with earlier investment experience, at the table where the two forms of work meet.
Cardialen’s announced Series B, October 2018
Company financing during Peters’s CEO tenure
Giving the discussion a chair
By June 2024, Peters was listed as moderator of an early-stage capital panel at Medtech MVP in Minneapolis. Its subject was strategic engagement and raising capital. The panel brought together Maria Berkman of Broadview Ventures, Christopher Kaster of Cadence, lawyer Patrice Kloss, executive Rick Sanghera, and investor Darshana Zaveri.
The format suited the range of his career. Moderating a discussion means arranging perspectives rather than occupying every position at once. The published agenda framed questions about access to institutional financing, common mistakes, and the viability of an early strategic partnership. Those are business questions with consequences for an organization’s resources and relationships.
Another 2024 program, MedTech Monitor on October 29, listed Peters with David Adair and Tom Moran in a discussion about building relationships with venture capital firms. Kathryn Dehn was the interviewer. In June 2025, the Medtech MVP agenda listed him on a scaling and commercialization panel, moderated by Stacey Pugh, alongside Mike Blue, Dehn, and Zaveri.
Taken together, the topics follow a company’s changing needs: first access to capital, then relationships with investors, then the work of scaling. The programs place Peters within those conversations. They also offer a present-day echo of the career’s earlier turns, when his own titles moved between investment analysis and operating leadership.
A founder still working on the explanation
Peters’s current roles bring the founder and venture partner together. At evanesce Medical, he is the founder and CEO. At OrbiMed, he is a venture partner. The organizations and titles deserve their full names because each carries a different responsibility. Founding a company and participating in an investment firm are distinct chapters even when they occupy the same biography.
A public testimonial from Peters adds a small, practical detail to the founder chapter. Discussing work with communications firm 3D, he credits help with gathering input and positioning the company. His description includes the phrase “the right input from the right stakeholders.” It points to the work required before a company can explain itself clearly: people have to contribute, and the resulting message has to serve the business.
There is something appealingly ordinary about that task. After the degrees, investment roles, executive titles, and board appointments, there is still a leadership team working on what to say and whom to ask. Experience does not abolish the need for other people’s input. The testimonial makes collaboration part of the founder’s public account.
His biography also makes room for an older relationship: Peters is married to his high school sweetheart and has four children. It is a brief personal detail alongside a long professional record. The career contains many institutional names; the family sentence refers to a connection that began before most of them entered the story.
That combination gives the profile its shape. Peters has accumulated ways of looking at a business while remaining connected to Minnesota and to a life beyond the job titles. Today’s founder and venture partner arrives with the analyst, technology executive, portfolio manager, and CEO chapters behind him. The next company-building question can be approached from more than one desk.