Vijay Pande Launches VZVC for 5 AI Biotech Bets After Managing $4 Billion

1 articles · Updated · TechCrunch · Aug 29

VZVC will make about five investments a year, with Pande and co-founder Zach Werner running the firm without associates and using in-house AI agents for daily work.
Pande said the smaller, concentrated model is meant to avoid spreading thin in a crowded market and to let the pair stay unusually hands-on, often joining rounds because founders want their expertise rather than for price competition.
His investment focus centers on AI for healthcare delivery and AI for clinical trials, where he argues better models can outperform animal studies that still leave only a 20% chance of a drug advancing from Phase 1 through Phase 3.
Pande said AI's biggest constraint in biotech is data: unlike internet text, biological data cannot be broadly scraped, pushing companies to build proprietary datasets even as open biological foundation models begin to emerge.
The launch marks a sharp shift from the a16z life-sciences practice Pande built to nearly $4 billion over more than a decade, reflecting his view that go-to-market discipline matters as much as breakthrough science.