Raising Health

a16z Partners Daisy Wolf and Eva Steinman talk with Zach Cohen and Raymond Wang, cofounders of Ease Health, a company building an AI operating system for behavioral health that combines CRM, EHR, and revenue cycle management into a single platform. They discuss why behavioral health software has lagged behind, what it means to build AI native versus AI integrated, and why Zach left his job as an investor at a16z to go build in this...

At the Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Summit 2025, Julie Yoo, General Partner at a16z Bio + Health, makes the case that healthcare is uniquely positioned to benefit from AI more than any other industry. She argues that healthcare's historical underinvestment in technology is now an asset, enabling the industry to leapfrog directly to AI-native models of care delivery with unprecedented speed and scale.

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a16z general partner Julie Yoo talks with Nikhil Buduma, CEO and cofounder of Ambience Healthcare, to discuss how AI is transforming clinical workflows. They cover the early days of deep learning, why Ambience started by running a medical practice before building a platform company, and what it takes to achieve high clinician adoption rates at major academic medical centers. They also dig into the challenge of building products whe...

a16z investors Daisy Wolf and Eva Steinman talk with Bobby Samuels, cofounder and CEO of Protege. They discuss the myth that we've run out of data for AI, how Protege connects healthcare systems and other data holders with the major AI labs, and why real-world data beats synthetic data for training models. Bobby also covers the growing demand for eval datasets, expanding beyond healthcare into video and audio, and what he's seeing ...

Recently,  a16z Bio + Health general partner Julie Yoo spoke with Nikita Singareddy, cofounder of Fortuna, and Florian Otto, cofounder of Cedar. They talked about why healthcare affordability is reaching a breaking point, how AI voice agents are transforming patient financial experiences, and what it will take to leapfrog decades of administrative burden in Medicaid—from 30-page paper applications to legacy technology systems built...

Out-of-Pocket is a healthcare education company founded by Nikhil Krishnan that helps people understand how healthcare works and how to navigate it in practice. In this episode, a16z investing partner Jay Rughani and Nikhil discuss why health insurance is losing its role as the default way people access care. They explain how rising costs are pushing more consumers to pay out of pocket for diagnostics, preventive care, and navigati...

Cofounders Jeremy Wohlwend and Gabriele Corso join the a16z podcast to discuss the launch of Boltz, a public benefit company building AI infrastructure for molecular biology. The conversation explains how breakthroughs following AlphaFold moved the field beyond protein structure prediction into modeling biomolecular interactions and binding strength, why open-source Boltz models saw rapid adoption across pharma and biotech, and how...

In this episode, a16z GP Julie Yoo sits down with Peter McCanna, CEO of Baylor Scott & White Health, to break down how one of America's largest health systems is transforming from a supply-driven "walled castle" to a customer-centric ecosystem, and how it's achieving a 10% operating margin while most hospitals struggle to stay in the black.

They get into why helping his father navigate healthcare convinced Pete the entire system is ...

A labor and delivery nurse who ran Senate healthcare policy now manages $1.7 trillion in federal health spending—and she runs her team like a startup.

Steph Carlton, Chief of Staff and Deputy Administrator at CMS, reveals the OKRs driving Medicare and Medicaid, why they're killing social determinants funding while building consumer health apps at scale, and how real-time provider data could collapse the 18-month lag between care del...

Drug discovery has doubled the flow of candidates, but approvals remain roughly flat. The constraint is development, not discovery. 

In this episode, a16z General Partner, Jorge Conde talks with Formation Bio cofounder and CEO Ben Liu about building a modern pharma company around clinical execution. They discuss Formation Bio’s hub-and-spoke model for acquiring and advancing assets, how AI compresses trial timelines and costs, picki...

Josh Weiner left Meta to return to CVS Health with two painful realizations: consumers don't manage their health—they expect it, and the healthcare market fundamentally violates every principle of economics. In this conversation with a16z's Julie Yoo, the CVS Senior VP explains why 50% of Americans can't afford a healthcare emergency, how CVS is becoming a platform to solve structural healthcare problems, and why the future depends...

For the first time in human history, we can diagnose thousands of genetic diseases—often for under $1,000—but we still can't treat most of them. The problem isn't understanding what's broken; it's delivering the fix to the right cells.

Eric Kelsic, CEO of Dyno Therapeutics, joins a16z's Jorge Conde to explain how AI-designed protein shells are solving gene therapy's delivery crisis. They explore why Huntington's patients can now get...

Cancer care in the U.S. costs over $250 billion each year, and nearly 2 million Americans receive a new diagnosis annually, yet too often the journey begins with silence: no call, no plan, no guide.

In this episode, a16z’s Vineeta Agarwala and Jay Rughani talk with Thyme Care leaders Robin Shah (cofounder and CEO), Bobby Green, MD (president and CMO), and Brad Diephuis, MD (president and COO) about rebuilding oncology around the pat...

In this episode, Julie Yoo and Jay Rughani are joined by Thatch cofounders Chris Ellis and Adam Stevenson to explore why ICHRA—a more recent policy innovation—might quietly revolutionize employer-sponsored health benefits. Unpacking the surprising history of how U.S. healthcare became entangled with employment, they make the case for a defined-contribution future that mirrors the rise of the 401(k) and HSA. Tailored especially for ...

In this episode,  Sprinter Health co-founders Max Cohen and Cameron Behar sit down with Julie Yoo to unpack how their home-based care model reaches underserved populations and reintegrates “the unengaged” into the healthcare system. From starting with blood draws in living rooms to scaling a high-complexity, tech-enabled logistics platform, they share how operations, empathy, and human connection power their success. The duo reflec...

In this episode, Tennr cofounder and CEO Trey Holterman sits down with a16z’s David Haber and Jay Rughani to unpack one of healthcare’s most overlooked pain points: patient referral logistics. When a patient is referred to a specialist and told that the specialist will follow up with them, what happens next? A convoluted system sometimes involving dozens of staff and multiple portals, all of which may or may not result in the speci...

What if one of healthcare’s most complex administrative challenges—revenue cycle management—was reframed as a data science problem? In this episode, Malinka Walaliyadde, cofounder and CEO of AKASA, joins Julie Yoo to unpack how large language models have the potential to transform hospital revenue by automating highly nuanced coding and billing workflows. 

Malinka discusses how AI is finally making it possible to extract simplicity ...

What if we stopped trying to cure disease and started preventing it instead? In this episode, Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute and a cardiologist, scientist, and author, joins a16z general partner Vijay Pande to unpack the future of aging, prevention, and precision health—as explored in Eric's new book, Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity.

Together, they discuss AI-dri...

Arif Nathoo, cofounder and CEO of Komodo Health, joins Jorge Conde and Jay Rughani to explore the transformative potential of healthcare data in reshaping biotech and healthcare innovation. Arif reflects on a decade-long journey of unlocking the power of fragmented healthcare data, delving into Komodo Health’s “full-stack thesis” — a strategy that combines rich datasets, advanced analytics, and AI to enable life sciences companies,...