Vijay Pande says his new VC firm will make fewer biotech bets

In short: Former Andreessen Horowitz biotech leader Vijay Pande says his new firm, VZVC, will make only a handful of investments each year and lean on AI in its daily work.

What's going on

Vijay Pande, a longtime Stanford researcher and former leader of Andreessen Horowitz’s biotech investing group, has started a new venture firm called VZVC. He co-founded it with investor Zach Werner. Pande previously helped build a16z’s biotech practice into one that managed close to $4 billion, according to TechCrunch.

Pande says VZVC is intentionally small. Instead of making dozens of investments a year, he says the firm expects to make around five. He compared adding a new company to the portfolio to a major life decision, not a quick social connection.

He also says the firm relies heavily on AI for day-to-day operations. In this context, AI means software that can spot patterns and summarize information, like a very fast assistant that reads and organizes huge amounts of material.

In the same interview, Pande talked about why AI in medicine is often limited by data. He said biology data is hard to collect and is not something you can simply pull from the open internet. That can push companies to keep their own “walled-off” datasets, meaning private data collections that others cannot access.

What to watch

Pande argues that more open, shared datasets could help AI tools improve healthcare faster, but he also warns that AI cannot make progress if the underlying data does not exist. Watch for whether more medical and biology “atlases” appear, which are shared maps of biological information that many teams can use.

Source: TechCrunch AI