What happened
Vijay Pande, who left a16z's roughly $4 billion biotech practice last year, has started a new, much smaller AI-native fund called VZVC. In a recent interview, he discussed why biology is finally shifting from a "discovery" science to an "engineering" one, why clinical trials are still brutally expensive, and why he thinks open, shared datasets (not walled-off ones) are what will actually let AI transform medicine.
Pande emphasized that his new approach involves betting smaller, saying, "We're not doing 30 bets a year." This contrasts with the larger scale of his previous role at a16z.