Sasha Kelemen, 35, is securing the financial future of women’s health.
Sasha Kelemen
While at Goldman Sachs, Kelemen held her own at tables full of primarily white men and got promoted to vice president.
She planned to stay, but things changed after the investment banker had her first daughter.
While on maternity leave in November 2020, she read everything possible about women’s health and felt there was untapped potential.
“There’s something here,” Kelemen said of her thinking at the time. “Why is nobody on Wall Street paying attention?”
In summer 2021, the bank SVB Leerink recruited Kelemen. In a 90-minute meeting, she pitched Barry Blake, a top banker there, on creating a team to land deals in women’s health.
But as a working mom at Goldman — short on time while weaning the baby off breast milk and caring for her when she got sick — she also told Blake about her family and intentions to grow it.
Blake endorsed both of Kelemen’s plans.
Now, at Leerink Partners, Kelemen runs the only women- and family-focused healthcare investment banking practice, staffed by a small team of female bankers, on Wall Street. And every day, her calendar is blocked from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. so she can spend time with her kids.
Part of Kelemen’s challenge is convincing largely male investors of the value of companies that treat menopause, pelvic-floor dysfunction, pain during sex, and other elements of a woman’s healthcare journey.
Last year, Kelemen sold a menopause-treatment startup to a national OB-GYN services company. It was the first deal Kelemen put together from start to finish, and the first time her client, the startup’s CEO Jill Angelo, wasn’t a man.
Right after the deal was announced, Kelemen hung up the phone and kissed her second daughter, who was then about 5 days old, on the head, thinking she might have better access to care one day. Then she started to tear up.
Kelemen added that other than that, she didn’t work during her maternity leave.
— Blake Dodge
