His new firm VZVC makes a handful of concentrated bets each year, has no associates, and relies on AI for daily operations.
Vijay Pande walked away from a16z last June to start VZVC, a much smaller firm that he co-founded with Zach Werner. Instead of running a $4 billion practice, VZVC makes a handful of concentrated bets each year, employs no associates, and uses AI heavily for daily operations.
Pande previously ran a16z’s healthcare and life sciences practice, which grew to manage close to $4 billion. He built his reputation as a Stanford chemistry professor and the creator of Folding@home, a distributed-computing project that turned millions of home PCs into a supercomputer for disease research.
For builders and operators, Pande’s shift shows that AI-driven biology still faces a data bottleneck. Biological data does not exist on the open internet, so each company builds its own walled-off dataset. That fragmentation slows the engineering approach Pande describes unless the industry finds ways to share.
Clinical trials remain the most expensive part of drug development, with costs reaching hundreds of millions of dollars and only a 20 percent success rate from first to third trial. Pande says AI can shrink the time and cost to reach trials, but the real test is whether synthetic data and shared datasets can reduce the failure rate.
What matters
- After running a $4 billion biotech practice at a16z, Pande left to co-found VZVC.
- Biology has shifted to engineering, but clinical trials still cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
- Watch whether biological data remains locked in walled-off datasets or becomes shared.
Why it matters
Watch whether biological data remains locked in walled-off datasets or becomes shared.
This GenAI News article was prepared in original wording using reporting and materials published by TechCrunch AI. Source reference: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/29/were-not-doing-30-bets-a-year-vijay-pande-on-betting-small-after-running-4-billion-at-a16z/.
Drafted by the GenAI News review pipeline.