Vijay Pande leaves a16z's $4B bio practice to run a two-person fund on AI agents
Vijay Pande, who built Andreessen Horowitz's bio and health practice to nearly $4 billion over a decade-plus, left in June 2025 and started VZVC with Zach Werner — two people, no associates, operations run on AI agents, roughly five concentrated bets a year in AI for healthcare delivery and clinical trials. The structure is the signal: a senior partner walked from platform-scale capital to argue that agent-run back offices make small teams viable, and Pande frames each new company as closer to deciding to have another child than to adding a social-media connection. No target fund size is disclosed.
Source: techcrunch.com ↗
If 8 out of 10 fail, and these things cost hundreds of millions of dollars, the amortized cost gets really high.
Vijay Pande
Why this matters
- → Senior biotech investor ditches $4B platform to bet small—signals AI agents make lean teams viable
- → Biological data can't be scraped; every company builds walled datasets—creates moat but fragments AI progress
- → AI now more predictive than animal models for drug trials; could slash the 80% failure rate
Biotech's data moat