Audacity Leadership
Dedicated to Serving Founder/Physician-Owned
Fertility Clinics and OEMs Just Like Yours
Our leadership has more than 50 years of combined investment banking & fertility experience and has successfully closed more than $2.0 billion worth of small-to-midsized business M&A transactions.
Jeffrey Shippy
Audacity Founder & CEO
Fertility Clinics and OEMs
Jeff is a seasoned investment banker with more than 25 years of experience advising founder-owned businesses. He also has direct operating experience within the fertility industry, serving as a strategic advisor within the assisted reproductive technologies (ART) and IVF industry in both EVP and CFO roles.
He is known for being a tenacious, dynamic, and creative deal maker. He has extensive healthcare experience and has closed numerous M&A transactions with sophisticated buyers (private equity and corporate). He is well known for driving extraordinary transaction outcomes through meticulous deal execution.
Prior to founding Audacity, Jeff was a Partner and Director of Healthcare at Stout Investment Bank, one of the nation's fastest growing middle-market investment banks. He joined at the launch of the Los Angeles office and helped to build it into one of the top "Best Places to Work in Los Angeles", per the L.A. Business Journal.
Prior to Stout, he served as an investment banker at Houlihan Lokey (NYSE: HLI), one of the nation's largest Wall Street investment banks.
Prior to investment banking he was a healthcare strategy consultant at Accenture (NYSE:ACN) in Palo Alto, California and an Private Equity Associate at Epic Ventures with a focus on medical and biotech investments.
Prior to this, he served as a licensed CPA at a one of the leading global public accounting firms, and later served as CFO for one of his clients where he playing a key transformative role in launching the company, obtaining institutional funding, and driving growth.
Jeff holds an M.B.A. in International Finance from Thunderbird, and a B.S. in Accountacy from Northern Illinois University.
In his spare time, Jeff is a songwriter and musician. He is also actively involved with music with his wife and three children.
Richard Shippy, Ph.D.
Managing Director
Fertility & Reproductive Health
Rich is a seasoned fertility and reproductive health expert and successful entrepreneur with more than 25 years of industry expertise. He has deep operator and scientific expertise with the fertility industry.
He has extensive relationships across the medical industry and proprietary insight regarding industry and acquisition trends, plus deep proprietary connections with under-the-radar industry buyers. Rich provides unmatched fertility and broader women's health insight and buyer access on behalf of Audacity's clients.
Rich is also a co-founder of Cradle Genomics, a rapidly growing prenatal testing medical device company that recently raised $17+ million of Series A funding from Illumina Ventures and Section 32.
Prior to founding Cradle Genomics, Rich served as Senior Director of Product Marketing at Illumina a (NASDAQ: ILMN) and Senior Director of Strategic Product Marketing for Clinical Applications and Molecular Cytogenetics at Affymetrix (NASDAQ:AFFX). Prior to Affymetrix, Rich was a Senior Scientist and Computational Biologist at GE Healthcare.
Rich holds a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Northern Illinois University, where he was also involved in critical early research and published studies surrounding HIV.
He also serves as Chief Business Officer for BioNano Genomics (NASDAQ: BNGO).
In his spare time, Rich enjoys golfing, scuba diving, wine, and global travel with his wife.