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Vijay Pande's VZVC trades a16z scale for small, AI-driven bets
Former a16z biotech lead Vijay Pande has swapped a roughly $4 billion practice for a lean new firm, VZVC, where he plans just a handful of concentrated investments each year. He argues that open, shared datasets are key to unlocking AI's potential in medicine.
Pande, a longtime academic, first gained attention in investor circles about a dozen years ago when Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz recruited him to lead their healthcare and life sciences practice. The firm had spent its first five years deliberately avoiding the sector.
In June 2025, Pande left to co-found VZVC with longtime investor Zach Werner. The new firm is intentionally small, with no associates and heavy reliance on AI for day-to-day operations.
Rather than making dozens of bets a year, Pande says VZVC is built around a handful of concentrated investments. He described biology as shifting from a "discovery" science to an "engineering" one, though he noted that clinical trials remain brutally expensive.
A central issue for AI-driven biotech, he said, is that biological data cannot be scraped from the internet like text. As a result, most companies build their own walled-off datasets. Pande contends that open, shared datasets will be essential for AI to genuinely transform medicine.