Our Story
The hardest ground in venture is early-stage health innovation.
We have crossed it, and now we guide the founders and investors crossing it.
History of the Inuksuk
An inuksuk (plural inuksuit) is a stone waymarking structure built by the Inuit across the Arctic regions of what is now Canada, Alaska, and Greenland. The word comes from Inuktitut and is commonly translated as “to act in the capacity of a human.” The root, inuk, means “person” and reflects the inuksuk’s job.
In a treeless, featureless landscape, inuksuit stood in for a person who wasn’t there, passing on knowledge from those who had travelled the land before. Inuksuit are made from carefully chosen, unshaped stones and had many forms and functions. They marked routes and directions, pointed toward communities and good hunting or fishing grounds, warned of danger such as deep snow, marked food caches, and guided caribou during hunts. Inuit tradition holds that inuksuit should not be knocked down; they are treated with respect and mark places of ceremonial importance.
Inuksuit carry knowledge of the land across generations, so the inuksuk has become a lasting symbol of guidance, survival and connection between people over time and distance. One of the largest concentrations is at Inuksugalait (Enukso Point) on the Foxe Peninsula of Baffin Island. Nearly 100 cairns stand there, some up to two meters (6.5 feet) tall, and may be as much as 2,000 years old. To a traveler crossing unfamiliar ground, finding an inuksuk meant someone had come that way before and left behind what they had learned: which way to go, what to avoid, and where to find what was needed. Each one was both a waypoint and a message, so no one had to cross hard terrain without guidance.
A New Waypoint
Like the Arctic, life science investing is unforgiving terrain. Timelines are long, capital needs are steep, and scientific or regulatory risk can stop a promising company cold. Early-stage funding has thinned while capital piles up in later rounds. Founders with breakthrough science have fewer places to turn, and investors struggle to see which opportunities are real.
Inuksuk Ventures was built to be the stone waymarking structure on that ground. For founders, we provide the capital, expertise, and industry relationships needed to move their science forward. For investors, we mark the opportunities worth pursuing and flag the hazards along the way. We can do this because we have made the crossing ourselves. Our founder, Dr. Marc Duey (Canadian immigrant to the Greater Philadelphia Area), has spent more than 30 years in venture life sciences. He built and exited ProMetrics (now ConcertAI), sits on the Board of Aprea Therapeutics (Nasdaq: APRE), and has founded 29 other companies purposed towards advancing human health. Joining him are industry experts such as Dr. Edi Kapetanovic, a board-certified Clinical Radiologist, Yale-trained, and co-founder of Adipoligo Health Sciences; and Dr. Louis Padulo, former Dean of Boston University’s College of Engineering and President of the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Like the inuksuk, we leave behind what we’ve learned so others can find their way. We share what the crossing has taught us wherever founders and investors meet. We host the Angel Venture Fair & Expo, the longest-running founder-investor event in the Mid-Atlantic. We teach and build at West Chester University, home of the Duey Biomedical Engineering Center. And we write: Marc co-authored “The Increasing Role of Venture Capital in Novel Drug Discovery” for Elsevier. Each founder we guide and each investor we bring makes the path clearer for whoever comes next.
Meet the team