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Jason Robart spent the first half of his career learning how the American healthcare system works from the inside. He spent the second half deciding which parts of it needed to be rebuilt. The co-founder and managing partner of Seae Ventures, the largest Black-owned early-stage healthcare venture capital firm in the country, has assembled an investment platform that sits at the intersection of health equity, financial technology, and the structural reform of how capital flows to underrepresented founders in the United States.
Robart's path into venture capital began not in finance but in the human side of large organizations. He earned his bachelor's degree in political science from Middlebury College in Vermont, a liberal arts institution known for producing graduates who enter policy, consulting, and public service. That foundation shaped his early career in ways that would later distinguish him from most venture investors, who typically arrive through investment banking or engineering. Robart understood people, organizations, and the politics of institutional change before he understood balance sheets and term sheets.
His first major professional stop was at Mercer Human Resource Consulting, where he worked as a principal advising large organizations on workforce strategy, compensation structures, and organizational design. The work gave him a deep understanding of how companies operate at the human level, how talent decisions drive business outcomes, and how institutional incentives shape behavior across complex organizations. He then served as vice president at Imagitas, a marketing services company, before taking on the role of president at Ceridian Performance Partners Canada, where he led the Canadian division of a human capital management firm that served major employers across North America.
The healthcare sector entered Robart's career when he joined Health Dialog, an international healthcare data analytics and care management company, as executive vice president. Health Dialog used data science to identify patients at risk of costly health events and to deliver care management interventions that improved outcomes while reducing spending. The role gave Robart his first direct exposure to the economics of healthcare delivery and the ways that data and technology could be deployed to improve population health at scale. It also introduced him to the systemic health disparities that would become the central focus of his investment career.
The defining chapter before Seae came at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, one of the largest health insurers in New England. Robart joined the organization and rose to the position of chief strategy officer, responsible for shaping the company's long-term direction during a period of rapid change in the American health insurance landscape. The Affordable Care Act was reshaping the regulatory environment, consumer expectations were shifting, and technology companies were beginning to enter healthcare in ways that threatened to disrupt traditional insurance models. Robart was tasked with positioning Blue Cross Blue Shield to navigate all of these forces simultaneously.
During his tenure, he also served as chief human resources officer, leading a comprehensive overhaul of the insurer's human capital strategies to better align them with the evolving dynamics of the Massachusetts healthcare market. The dual role gave him an unusually broad view of the organization, spanning both its external competitive strategy and its internal operational capabilities.
Most significantly, Robart became president and CEO of Zaffre Investments, the wholly owned venture subsidiary of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. At Zaffre, he built and managed a corporate venture fund that invested in early- to growth-stage healthcare technology and services companies. The fund deployed capital into startups whose products and platforms aligned with the insurer's strategic priorities, giving Robart direct experience in sourcing deals, conducting due diligence, structuring investments, negotiating terms, and serving on the boards of portfolio companies. It was at Zaffre that he first worked alongside Tuoyo Louis, who managed the fund's day-to-day investment operations. The professional partnership that formed between Robart and Louis at Blue Cross Blue Shield would become the foundation of Seae Ventures.
In 2019, Robart, Louis, and Pete Sally co-founded Seae Ventures with a thesis that was both commercially grounded and socially urgent. The firm would invest in pre-seed, seed, and seed-plus stage companies in healthcare technology, healthcare services, and financial technology, with a deliberate emphasis on backing founders who were women or people of color. The logic behind the emphasis was not charitable. Robart had seen firsthand, through his work at Health Dialog and Blue Cross Blue Shield, that the American healthcare system's most significant market inefficiencies were concentrated in the communities it served worst. The founders building solutions for those communities were often the least likely to receive venture funding through traditional channels.
The inaugural fund closed in June 2022 at $107 million, making Seae the largest fund dedicated to investing in women- and BIPOC-led companies in healthcare and fintech. The firm deployed capital into 17 portfolio companies, including Health in Her HUE, Hurdle, MD Ally, Moving Analytics, and Tia. Robart took board seats at several portfolio companies, including Hurdle, Kiyatec, MyMeds, and ScriptSee, where his operational background in human capital management, organizational strategy, and healthcare delivery gave him a differentiated ability to advise founders on scaling their businesses within complex regulatory environments.
In 2024, Seae acquired Unseen Capital, a pre-seed vehicle focused on diverse healthcare entrepreneurs, pushing the firm's total assets under management beyond $200 million. The firm began raising its second fund with a reported target of $150 million while managing a separate $30 million vehicle through the Unseen platform for the earliest-stage investments.
Beyond Seae, Robart has built a governance portfolio that extends into insurance, healthcare policy, and public company oversight. In March 2022, he was appointed to the board of directors of SiriusPoint, a publicly traded global insurance and reinsurance company on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker SPNT. The appointment placed him in a corporate governance role overseeing a company with significant exposure to healthcare-related risk, connecting his insurance industry expertise with his investment work at Seae. He also serves on the board of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont.
Robart was named to the Top 50 in Digital Health, a recognition of his influence in the healthcare technology investment community. He has spoken publicly and frequently about the role that private venture capital must play in reducing health disparities in the United States, arguing that the market failures embedded in the American healthcare system cannot be addressed by government policy alone. His position is that targeted private investment in technology companies serving underserved populations represents both a moral imperative and a commercial opportunity of enormous scale.
What distinguishes Robart among healthcare investors is the breadth of his operational experience before entering venture capital. He ran human capital divisions. He led corporate strategy for a major insurer. He managed a corporate venture fund. He served on the boards of public and private companies across multiple industries. That accumulation of institutional knowledge informs every investment decision at Seae and shapes how the firm works with its portfolio companies after the check is written.
Robart represents a particular kind of Black investor: one who built his expertise inside the institutions that define American healthcare and then used that expertise to build something independent, something designed specifically to channel capital toward the founders and communities those institutions have historically underserved.
