Vijay Pande, who built Andreessen Horowitz鈥檚 healthcare and life sciences practice into a nearly $4 billion operation over more than a decade, has left that role to launch a smaller firm called VZVC with longtime investor Zach Werner. The new venture makes only a handful of concentrated bets each year, has no associates, and relies heavily on AI for daily operations. Pande, a former Stanford chemistry professor best known for creating the distributed-computing project Folding@home, told TechCrunch he is deliberately avoiding the strategy of spreading investments across dozens of startups annually.
Pande said biology is shifting from a science of discovery to an engineering discipline, with AI and machine learning helping identify drug targets, design drugs, and assist in clinical trials, which remain the most expensive part of the process. He noted that while getting to trials has become faster and cheaper, running a trial can still cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and only 20 percent of drugs succeed from the first trial through the third. The main reason for failure, he said, is that drugs are designed on animal models that are not very predictive of human responses, and AI models are expected to outperform those animal tests.
The investor also discussed precision medicine, explaining that patients would be better off if the first drug prescribed were the right one, rather than the current trial-and-error approach common in cancer and other fields. He noted that blood test results are typically compared to population averages, but the future lies in understanding what is normal for each individual. Pande said progress in this area has been steady over the past decade, driven by advances in proteomics and automated robotic measurements that pair naturally with AI.
On the challenge of data scarcity, Pande said biology is one of the few fields where AI cannot simply scrape data from the internet, meaning every company ends up building its own walled-off dataset. He drew a parallel to medical specialists who often do not coordinate well across fields, and said AI could in principle act as a specialist in everything, seeing patterns no single human could. He expressed optimism that open-source foundation models in biology, similar to what has happened with open-source large language models, will have a broad impact as biological atlases become more common.
Pande is involved with Genesis Therapeutics, which came out of his Stanford lab, and Insitro, the drug-discovery firm founded by Daphne Koller, and he said he is also incubating a company with a founder he has known for two decades. He said he focuses on AI for healthcare delivery and AI for clinical trials, and looks for founders with high integrity whom he can trust for five to ten years or more. He recalled that a decade ago there was widespread resistance to applying AI to medicine and biology, but that resistance has largely disappeared, and he now advises founders that go-to-market matters as much as the technology itself.
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