Vijay Pande leaves a16z to make fewer, bigger biotech bets

Vijay Pande built a career studying protein folding as a Stanford chemistry professor — work that produced Folding@home, the distributed-computing project that turned millions of home PCs into a supercomputer for disease research — before Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz recruited him about a dozen years ago to run a16z’s first bet on healthcare and life sciences, a category the firm had explicitly avoided during its first five years. Over the next decade-plus, Pande grew that practice into one managing close to $4 billion.

In June of last year, Pande left to start something far smaller. His new firm, VZVC, co-founded with longtime investor Zack Werner, makes a handful of concentrated bets — about five a year, Pande said, rather than the dozens a typical fund might pursue. VZVC has no associates and relies heavily on AI for its day-to-day operations. “Adding a company at a typical fund is like adding a Facebook friend — that’s something you do pretty quickly,” Pande said of the contrast.

Pande’s thesis centers on a shift he sees in biology: from a “science of discovery” to something engineerable, as AI helps identify drug targets, design molecules, and support clinical trials — the most expensive part of drug development. He noted that just 20% of drugs that enter a first clinical trial make it through the third, and with each trial costing hundreds of millions of dollars, those failures make the amortized cost of a successful drug extremely high. Most failures, he said, trace back to animal models that don’t predict human outcomes well — a gap he believes AI-derived models can narrow, even if imperfectly.

Unlike text, Pande said, biological data can’t be scraped from the internet, so most AI-biology companies end up building their own walled-off datasets — a dynamic he expects to shift as companies build shared “atlases” of biological information, often as foundation models, mirroring the rise of open-source LLMs. Pande remains involved with Genesis Molecular AI, which grew out of his Stanford lab, and Insitro, the drug-discovery company founded by former Stanford colleague Daphne Koller.

Why it matters

Pande’s bet that fewer, deeper investments beat a high-volume portfolio approach tests whether AI-driven biotech — still constrained by scarce, proprietary biological data — rewards concentration over the spray-and-pray model that dominated the last venture cycle.