A myriad of AI, science, and technology experts explore the real challenges and enormous opportunities facing entrepreneurs who are building the future of health. Raising Health, a podcast by a16z Bio + Health, dives deep into the heart of biotechnology and healthcare innovation. Join veteran compan
a16z General Partner Jorge Conde sits down with Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel to discuss a major milestone for mRNA technology: positive Phase 3 results from Moderna and Merck’s individualized treatment for melanoma, after more than a decade of work on personalized cancer vaccines. Stéphane explains how the treatment works by sequencing an individual patient’s tumor and healthy cells, identifying the mutations most relevant to their cancer, and encoding up to 34 of them into an mRNA designed specifically for that patient. Rather than simply unleashing the immune system, the goal is to teach it…
Julie Yoo sits down with Dr. Suchi Saria, founder and CEO of Bayesian Health, to discuss the current state of clinical AI and what it takes to deploy AI systems in real-world healthcare settings. While much of the recent attention around AI has focused on copilots, chatbots, and administrative workflows, Saria argues that the greatest opportunity lies in helping clinicians make better decisions at the point of care. She explains how Bayesian Health's clinical intelligence platform continuously analyzes multimodal patient data to identify signs of deterioration, sepsis, and other high-risk…
Nicolás Abad, founder and CEO of Telepatía, joins a16z to discuss building AI-powered tools for healthcare in Latin America. Inspired by the loss of his father to a preventable medical error, Adbad set out to address one of the region’s most significant challenges: a shortage of doctors, fragmented medical records, and limited healthcare infrastructure across a population of more than 700 million people. Telepatía's first product acts as a clinical copilot, helping physicians document visits, access patient context, and make more informed decisions. The conversation explores healthcare…
This episode originally aired on StartUp Health. Unity Stoakes speaks with Julie Yoo, general partner at a16z, about why healthcare is poised to benefit more from AI than any other industry, how the business profile of health tech companies has fundamentally shifted, and what founders need to show up with today to stand out at the seed and Series A stages.
Daisy Wolf speaks with Dr. Andrew Huberman, professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University and host of the Huberman Lab podcast. They discuss how the pandemic sparked a consumer health revolution, the emerging peptide and GLP landscape, what the science actually says about focus drugs, and the neurotechnologies Huberman believes will let us write to our own biology within the next five years.
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 space. They also cover how Ease plans to replace the dozen software vendors most practices rely on today.
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.
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 when AI capabilities change every few months, the real ROI that's finally converting CFOs, and why this might be the moment to reimagine the legacy EHR stack.
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 from the biggest AI companies as they race to acquire training data.
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 in the 1990s to the real opportunity for giving every American a "five-star healthcare experience."
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 navigation. The conversation also looks at what this shift means for startups, AI-powered tools, regulation, and access as healthcare continues to move beyond insurance.
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 that work is now being productized. They outline the launch of Boltz Lab, a platform that brings protein and small-molecule design agents into scientist…
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 fundamentally broken, what differentiates academic medical centers from community health systems, and why traditional hospital economics root out essential…
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 delivery and payment. The team mixing founders with policy veterans is rewriting quality measures around VO2 max and app engagement, not just disease…
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, picking winners, regulatory strategy, and what it would take to move from about 50 approvals a year to many more. They also touch on global competition and why clinical…
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 on consumers finally controlling their own health data.
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 15 extra years of healthy life, how Dyno inverted the liver-to-brain delivery ratio by 1000x, and why capsids evolved by nature are now being designed by machine…
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 patient. They cover where the system breaks, how navigation plus value-based contracts align incentives, how AI can extend clinicians, and what scale looks like…
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.
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.
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.
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.
What if we stopped trying to cure disease and started preventing it instead? In this episode, Eric Topol joins 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.
Ankit Jain, CEO and cofounder of Infinitus Systems, Inc, joins Julie Yoo, a16z Bio + Health general partner.
About Raising Health
A myriad of AI, science, and technology experts explore the real challenges and enormous opportunities facing entrepreneurs who are building the future of health. Raising Health, a podcast by a16z Bio + Health, dives deep into the heart of biotechnology and healthcare innovation. Join veteran compan
Raising Health is a English tech & science podcast from Andreessen Horowitz, a16z Bio + Health. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.
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