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

A venture investor who previously managed close to $4 billion in a healthcare and life sciences practice at a major firm has started a smaller investment firm that makes only a handful of concentrated bets per year instead of dozens. The shift reflects a broader change in how AI is transforming drug development, moving from discovery-based approaches to engineered solutions that can better predict human outcomes than traditional animal models. A key challenge in AI-driven biotech is that biological data cannot be freely gathered from the internet like text data, meaning companies must build their own datasets, which raises questions about how advances in AI medicine will be shared across the field. The investor argues that AI could eventually integrate siloed medical knowledge to provide specialists in everything, though this requires greater data sharing through open-source biological foundation models.