After more than two decades advising private wealth and institutional investors, Maryann Selfe is applying her experience in capital allocation, manager selection and portfolio construction to one of healthcare’s most overlooked investment opportunities: women’s health.
1. What is your story, and how did more than two decades in private banking and institutional investing lead you to women’s-health investing?
I am a Nigerian-born Anglo-Swiss woman who’s spent more than twenty years working across private banking, wealth and asset management. I built my career at one of the world’s leading global banks, working in London, New York and Zurich. Much of that career involved helping family offices, private clients and institutional investors make long-term capital-allocation decisions across public and private markets.
I advised on more than CHF 700 million in client assets and held investment responsibility across mandates exceeding CHF 5 billion. My work taught me to look beyond an attractive investment story and ask a more practical question: can investors access the opportunity in a disciplined, well-governed and appropriately diversified way?
Over time, I noticed a significant disconnect in healthcare. Scientific progress was accelerating across women’s health, while technology and AI were creating new possibilities in diagnosis, prevention and treatment.
Women were demonstrating that they were both willing and able to pay for science-backed innovations that improved their health and wellbeing. Yet despite these powerful trends, women’s health remained markedly undercapitalized. It was a paradox.
The more closely I examined the market, the more I realized that the problem was not simply a shortage of promising women’s-health companies. The investment infrastructure connecting those opportunities with institutional capital was also significantly underdeveloped.
Today, I am the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Calabar Capital, an institutional investment platform in development focused on Women’s Health and Healthcare AI/Tech. I am also the author of The Billion Dollar Blindspot and Founder and President of FemmeHealth Alliance.
These initiatives play different roles, but they are connected by one objective: helping build the intelligence, relationships and investment infrastructure needed for long-term capital to participate confidently in women’s health.
2. What have been the greatest challenges in moving from an established institutional career to building something new?
The greatest challenge has been learning to move forward without all the certainty and infrastructure that come with an established institution.
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