Anna Valcheva is a Venture Partner and Advisor of Alumni Ventures Group and the Founder and CEO of Astra Ventures - a strategic, capital markets, corporate & business development and investment consultancy that enables mission-aligned founders and funders advance and commercialize impact innovations in Human & Planetary Health.
She works with entrepreneurs, venture capital and private equity on funding, scaling and optimizing growth revenue and sales, commercial operations, and business and corporate development, through the various stages of the private capital cycle - from seed through growth, late-stage secondary markets/pre-IPO to IPO.
She consults founders and financial sponsors on appropriate exits in the strategic/M&A, secondary private capital markets and IPO equity capital markets.
A former JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs well-established IPO and equity/equity-linked and derivative capital markets investment banker, Anna was a co-founder, internationally recognized multiple award-winning innovator and intrapreneur in capital markets, building two startup business lines in the U.S. and EMEA from zero to $200+mm revenue in 2-4 years, respectively.
A long-time, purpose-driven champion of women, Anna was a founding member and a Managing Director of the first impact- oriented private equity sponsor and investment banking advisory firm exclusively focused on supporting women founders and the female C-suite on company and investor side.
She was Investment Advisor for the United Nations and UNDP organizations around the world advancing planetary health through sustainable investments and catalyzing environmental finance.
She was an advisor to the “100 Startups Against Cancer” CAI-MedImmune-AstraZeneca healthcare startup accelerator, commercializing the top 100 University held patents advancing the cure of cancer, advisor to the Tamer Fund for Social Impact Ventures, the impact-oriented Global Entrepreneurship Center, among many others.
Previously, Anna was a Managing Director of FNEX Capital and FNEX Ventures, one of the most active firms for direct late-stage venture capital that developed the secondary markets for private shares, from their early days to the major marketplace for liquidity pre-IPO they are today.
Through her own painful Hero’s Journey, overcoming through self-agency, self-driven scholarship and self-led treatment that led to the miraculous healing of both own and close family circle’s serious, some terminal, some dubbed “untreatable” by conventional medicine health challenges, she is first-hand familiar with the shortcomings of allopathic medicine and of our ineffective healthcare systems.
She is knowledgeable and passionate about the available scientific breakthroughs in many frontier sciences that need urgent commercialization and scaling to lead to the health breakthrough that billions need. Her Purpose and Mission is to serve to enable direly needed change in how we approach, understand, diagnose and treat Women’s Health, advance Precision 2 Integrative, Functional, Whole-Person Medicine, advance Mental, Cognitive & Behavioral Health, Brain Health and Neuroscience, as well as effect the changes needed in other critical industries that deeply affect human health and wellness.
Anna is an alumna of Brown University with a triple Bachelor’s Magna Cum Laude, Honors degree in Economics with Applied Mathematics, International Relations, and Organizational Behavior and Management and of Oxford University in the U.K..
She holds the Global MBA of Columbia Business School in the U.S. and London Business School in the U.K..
She is a lifetime passionate student of Nutritional Sciences, Integrative and Functional Medicine, Biohacking, Clinical Psychology, Energy Psychology, Integrative Functional Psychiatry, cutting-edge Psychotherapies, Mental, Cognitive & Behavioral Health, and a Brain & Neuroscience Researcher.