Founder | Managing Partner

Rakesh Ahuja

A seasoned biotech investment and strategy professional with a deep foundation in medicine and life sciences and 20+ years of experience. His early academic and research achievements include published work in the Journal of Immunology during his time at Harvard Medical School, a Howard Hughes Research Scientist Award for his immunology work at UC Berkeley, and the prestigious Etta S. Chidsey Award in Cancer Research for neurovirology research conducted at the Yale School of Medicine. In parallel, he authored educational case materials that have supported thousands of U.S. medical students in preparing for licensing exams—underscoring his longstanding commitment to translational science and education.

For nearly a decade, he trained to become a neurosurgeon before pivoting to a career in biotech investing. He began on Wall Street with roles in biotech investment banking and equity research at Citigroup and Guggenheim, then became the first investment team hire at a premier New York-based biotech hedge fund. From 2019 to 2024, he led over $200 million in therapeutics investments across more than 20 public and private development-stage biotech companies. While therapeutically agnostic, he developed deep expertise in immunology, rare diseases, neurology, and gene therapy—drawing on over ten years of academic research at Yale, UCSF, and Harvard. His strategic insight was instrumental in scaling the fund’s assets under management from $66 million at inception to approximately $500 million within three years—a particularly notable achievement given the challenging state of the biotech market during that period.

Today, he brings his cross-disciplinary expertise to Apex BioAdvisors, LLC, where he provides strategic advisory services to biotech companies across stages of growth. His practice covers competitive intelligence, business development (including licensing and M&A), portfolio optimization, investor relations strategy (with a focus on investor and sell-side engagement), and both clinical data and financial modeling—from term sheet negotiation to cap table optimization and valuation analysis. He works closely with C-suite executives and IR leaders to guide critical strategic decisions and drive long-term enterprise value.

He holds an MBA in Finance from the University of California, Irvine, completed his pre-clinical medical training at Yale School of Medicine with USMLE scores in the 99th percentile, and graduated with honors in Biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley.

At the intersection of science, strategy, and capital markets, he remains driven by a mission to accelerate the development of transformative therapies that improve patient outcomes and deliver long-term value to stakeholders across the biotech ecosystem.