Elliot Menschik

Elliot is a physician/scientist/engineer turned repeat founder/operator and startup investor. At Amazon’s cloud computing arm, AWS, he leads efforts to put the company’s resources to work on behalf of healthcare and life science startups from birth to exit, partnering with venture funds around the world.

Earlier he founded and led the healthcare arm of DreamIt Ventures where he sourced, seeded and worked alongside 40+ healthtech startups (health IT, diagnostics, devices), getting them off the starting blocks and to market with first customers and strategic partners. This work was a close collaboration with industry leaders including Johns Hopkins, Penn Medicine, Independence Blue Cross, and Kaiser Permanente. He was previously the founder/CEO of HxTechnologies, an early player in health information exchange (think BitTorrent or Napster for medical images and records) which he sold in 2009 to Health Care Service Corporation. HCSC owns and operates Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, Illinois, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Montana. Post-acquisition, he served as general manager at their health IT subsidiary, MEDecision, with responsibility for launching and running its provider-facing business including care coordination, health information exchange, electronic health records, personal health records and telemedicine. Elliot also co-founded and ran Venturef0rth, one of the first coworking spaces in Philadelphia, which he successfully grew and sold in 2014.

For the past 5 years he’s served on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania where he’s taught science and engineering students how to launch and run startups. Elliot earned his MD and PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania following his research into Alzheimer’s disease and memory function using high performance computational models of the hippocampus.

 He earlier attended Johns Hopkins designing microchips that simulated neurons and cardiac pacemaker cells and earning MSE and BSEE degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering.