1/ In the past few months, the founders of Instacart, Spotify, and Coinbase have all started new healthcare companies. This may seem odd to some – why are these seasoned tech founders jumping into tech-driven healthcare? A 🧵: a16z.com/2023/04/20/hey-tech…

It was surreal to chat with Gloria Steinem in her living room!!!!! Thank you @karinklein for making a girl’s dream come true.

π0.5 driving autonomous anastomosis!

In the end (at the beginning?), nestled in a den of AI agents thinking about our health, managing all our meds, and arguing with all the other agents… …we will all pray for easy vascular access and great surgical hands These feel like the final frontier in care delivery. May the robots be magnificent

Thank you for coming on the pod @hubermanlab! I really enjoyed the conversation.

The next health revolution may come from individuals learning to control their own biology. In this conversation with a16z's Daisy Wolf, Andrew Huberman explores the remarkable ways emerging tools and cultural shifts are enabling people to optimize sleep, metabolism, focus, and performance. - How COVID accelerated a shift toward self-directed health and personal agency - Why resistance training, sunlight exposure, and sleep are the highest-leverage interventions for physical and cognitive performance - The transformative potential of GLP-1 drugs in treating obesity - Why peptides and emerging bio-optimization tools are gaining traction outside traditional medicine - The difference between reading biology (wearables, biomarkers) and writing to it ... and more. 0:00 Introduction 1:15 The health awakening, explained 7:02 MAHA's role in the health movement 13:05 GLP-1: Nearly one in seven Americans 18:37 The non-GLP peptide craze 25:16 Rogue experiments and low-dose GLP 31:40 Real-time cortisol sensing 44:39 The pet octopus and AI communication @hubermanlab @daisydwolf

Whoever is running partnerships at Function is on fire! Equinox, Sweetgreen, Erewhon, Robinhood, and now Chase! They’re everywhere 😍

A healthy body isn’t just an investment in feeling good. It’s the smart financial choice. @Chase Sapphire card members: You can now earn cash back when you invest in your health with @function. Chase Sapphire Reserve cardmembers earn 50% cash back on a $365 membership. Chase Sapphire Preferred cardmembers earn 15% cash back on a $365 membership. Offer valid through March 31, 2026. Visit Chase Offers in the Chase Mobile®️ app to activate the Function offer.

We @a16z could not be more thrilled to lead @tryeasehealth's $41M Series A to redefine healthcare’s operating system, unifying intake (CRM), clinical (EHR), and billing (RCM) into a single, AI-native core platform. We’ve seen this operating system playbook succeed in other industries with companies like Toast and ServiceTitan. Healthcare – long burdened by fragmented, legacy software – is ready for the same shift. Ease is starting in behavioral health, and already supports hundreds of providers across inpatient, outpatient (IOP, PHP, MAT), and residential. The team made this decision easy. CEO @zachcohen25 has been a friend and colleague at a16z for years, and was someone I knew I’d be extremely lucky to back if ever given the opportunity. CTO @therealarrays is an incredible engineering leader with a track record of building and scaling elite technical teams. And President Steve Gold previously built and sold the behavioral health leader Refresh to Optum for one of the largest exits in the space. We’re proud to partner with Zach, Raymond, and Steve, and to invest alongside @AbstractVC, @BoxGroup, @seedtosunflower, and F3 Partners. Check it out: easehealth.com @EvaSteinman @illscience

A few years ago, calling yourself a consumer health company in front of VCs was a virtual death sentence... but now, not only is consumer health being taken seriously, there are also some very serious consumer health businesses being built in the wild. This, plus other hot takes from @hollsmaloney, @ryu_alison, @KGSeidensticker and I at the inaugural Stanford Consumer Health Summit: ⚡ It's certainly possible now to build a large business purely based on cash pay DTC acquisition. But playing nice with "The System" (e.g. B2B2C distribution, referrals from trad providers, taking reimbursement risk) still has its merits in helping one achieve even more durable scale and unit economics. ⚡ Sequencing of GTM motions matters: if you go "B2C first", you have the gifts of being able to fully control your product roadmap and swiftly acquire users - but it will be more expensive and potentially take longer to acquire them on your own. Going "B2B2C first" means you'll get access to large chunks of users in one fell swoop, but you'll have to pay a "product tax" to appease your B2B partner's requirements, not to mention needing to survive through long enterprise sales cycles. This sequencing choice informs your capital raising strategy in the early days. ⚡ A year ago, everyone was scared to say "AI Doctor", and now everyone is claiming to be building an "AI Doctor"! ⚡ To that end, will healthcare be dominated by an AI Doctor SuperApp as the front door, or will we continue to have fragmentation of apps by use case / condition / demographic? A large portion of consumers who don't have a PCP will find one in the form of an AI Doctor, and the best AI Doctors WILL be SuperApps that connect into a network of specialists and IRL clinical services through a single front door. ⚡ This necessitates a SuperData layer that allows for context sharing across all apps - and not just trad EHR data, but also wearables, genomics, non-traditional biomarker tests, information gleaned through ongoing engagement with AIs, patient-reported outcomes, health plan benefit design data info, etc. The buzz in the room felt a lot like the early versions of the Health 2.0 conference in the late 2000's, BUT with companies that are really working and scaling this time around. Congrats to @ZHTeiger and his organizing team for bringing this community together - it's time to build in consumer health!

There are three fundamental bottlenecks to AI progress: models, chips, and data. We have model builders and chip producers, but data is the bottleneck to AI progress. Protege is the trusted data infrastructure layer that’s here to solve that. Curated, licensed, privacy-protected data, ready for AI. 2025 was a banner year: we facilitated tens of millions of dollars in transactions for AI companies worldwide, including the majority of the Magnificent Seven. We unlocked tens of millions in revenue for data and content rights-holders worldwide. But we’re just getting started. 2026 and beyond will require the full breadth and depth of the data that’s naturally generated by people living their normal lives — from healthcare to video to audio to motion capture, and much, much more. Come build with us! We’re hiring for roles across the team. @daisydwolf @evajsteinman @a16z @nbt @footworkvc @saarsaar @CRV @BloombergBeta @flexcapital @svangel

Go @martabralic and @pomelocare! Congrats on the $92M Series C at a $1.7B valuation!

Today’s most capable models are increasingly constrained by access to data. Public datasets are largely exhausted. The internet has been scraped. AI models now need high-quality, real-world data to continue advancing. That’s why we’re excited to announce a $30M Series A investment in Protege, the platform building the real-world data infrastructure for AI. @withprotegeai connects the world’s leading AI builders with massive, multimodal datasets across healthcare, video, audio, motion capture, and more, unlocking data that has historically been fragmented, inaccessible, or prohibitively slow to use at scale. Protege has already found an impressive product-market fit, and is a core data partner to the majority of MAG7 public companies, as well as many of the largest private players in AI. We couldn’t think of a better team to build this company than Bobby Samuels (cofounder & CEO) and Travis May (cofounder and Chairman), who spent a decade building Datavant and LiveRamp into two of the biggest exits in the data space, alongside fellow cofounders Engy Ziedan (Chief Scientific Officer) and Richard Ho (CTO), who bring deep data and technical expertise. By @daisydwolf and Eva Steinman @BobbySamuels @engyziedan

Today, we are thrilled to announce that @withprotegeai has raised a new $30M funding round led by @a16z. When @BobbySamuels and former @DatavantHQ co-founder and CEO Travis May first started Protege in 2024, we saw three bottlenecks to AI’s progress — compute, models, and data. Compute has scaled dramatically, models continue to improve, but access to the right data remains the hardest part. That’s why Protege exists: to be the infrastructure for real-world data in AI development. In the few months since our last round of funding, we’ve felt the urgent demand pull across industries, domains, and modalities. We are rapidly expanding to meet those needs. When AI builders come to Protege, they’re looking for real-world data: the most authentic signal of how people and systems actually behave. This is not synthetic data created by AI nor manufactured data created to simulate human behavior. Across every stage of the AI development lifecycle — from pre-training to post-training to fine-tuning to evaluation — AI builders need this data. They’re looking across modalities and industries: healthcare, video, audio, motion capture, gaming, manufacturing, life sciences, real estate, finance, education, and many more. Foundational, multi-modal model-builders (including the majority of the Magnificent Seven) now work with us across multiple domains along with dozens of other model builders. Thanks to @daisydwolf and the rest of the a16z team for joining us on this journey as well as our existing investors also participating in this round — @nbt at @footworkvc, @saarsaar at @CRV, @BloombergBeta, @flexcapital, Shaper Capital, and others. Lastly, a huge thank you to the @withprotegeai team for making this all possible. More details in 🧵! #AIDevelopment #DataInfrastructure #a16z #StartupFunding #Protege

Data is going to define the next decade of AI progress. Models are hungry for more, and the internet has been scraped. Very excited that we @a16z are leading a $30M Series A into @withprotegeai to deliver high-quality, real-world data that would otherwise be buried in bureaucracy. I’ve known @BobbySamuels for almost a decade, and there’s no one else I’d choose for this mission. Read more here: a16z.com/announcement/invest…

I think Justin will be a household name in business Already an insane track record, and one of the highest quality people I’ve encountered

Thrilled to be leading @Truemed's $34M Series A!