“We’re not doing 30 bets a year”: Vijay Pande on betting small after running $4 billion at a16z

image via TechCrunch

August 29, 2026, 5:36 PM

• •Pande said he left a16z’s life sciences practice, which had grown to nearly $4 billion, to co-found the smaller firm VZVC with Zach Werner.
• •VZVC is designed to make roughly five highly concentrated investments per year instead of dozens, and Pande said the firm has no associates.
• •He identified AI for healthcare delivery and AI for clinical trials as two of his main investment areas.
• •Pande said drug development is improving with AI, but clinical trials still often cost hundreds of millions of dollars and many drugs fail because animal models poorly predict human outcomes.
• •He argued that open biological foundation models and shared data atlases could have an impact similar to open-source large language models in AI.
• •Companies and projects mentioned include Genesis Therapeutics, Insitro, Folding@home, a16z, Valor, Thrive, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, Nvidia, Instinct, Fitbit, Luffu Link, and Airbound.

Vijay Pande told TechCrunch that after building Andreessen Horowitz’s biotech practice into a roughly $4 billion business, he left to launch the much smaller VZVC with Zach Werner. He said the firm plans to make about five concentrated investments a year, using AI agents in place of a larger associate-heavy team. Pande argued that AI is helping shift biology from a discovery-driven field toward a more engineering-like discipline, particularly in target selection, drug design, and eventually clinical trials. He also said medicine’s biggest bottleneck remains limited and fragmented biological data, making open shared datasets and foundation models important to AI’s long-term impact on healthcare.

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