Peninsula Couple Donates $80M To Palo Alto Hospital

PALO ALTO, CA — A Peninsula couple is showing their appreciation for the care they received at a Palo Alto hospital in a way that figures to leave a lasting impact.

A prominent Silicon Valley tech investor and his wife have donated $80 million to Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford and the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Bruce Dunlevie is a co-founder of Benchmark, a prominent San Francisco-based venture capital firm that has funded a who’s-who of tech juggernauts including Twitter, Uber, Nextdoor, Yelp and Zillow.

Elizabeth Dunlevie, who is board chair at the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health and a board member at Packard Children’s Hospital, acknowledged the contribution is personal.

“My journey with this hospital started as the mother of a child who needed life-saving care, and my family is forever grateful for Lucile’s vision and the care teams who ensured this hospital was here for us when we needed it,” she said in a statement.

The donation is the largest the hospital has ever received from individuals.

Fifty million dollars of the donation will go towards the transformation of the first floor of Packard Children's Hospital West building, which will primarily serve mothers and babies, and $30 million to further develop the hospital's world-class Maternal-Fetal Medicine program at the School of Medicine.

“The impact of this incredible gift will be felt for generations—for the mothers and babies we help and, perhaps even more importantly, for those we will never have to treat because of new discoveries and cures made possible by this investment,” Paul King, president and CEO of Packard Children’s Hospital and Stanford Children’s Health said in a statement.

“My heart is full knowing that Elizabeth and Bruce’s gift embodies Lucile Packard’s intent for this hospital to be both a leading academic medical center as well as a community hospital available to all who need us.”

— Bay City News contributed to this report