Vijay Pande, the former general partner who built Andreessen Horowitz’s bio fund into a nearly $4 billion practice, left the firm in June 2024 to launch VZVC with longtime investor Zach Werner. The new investment vehicle has no associates, relies heavily on AI agents for daily work and plans to make about five concentrated investments a year, rather than pursuing the higher-volume model common in venture capital. Pande, a Stanford chemistry professor who created the Folding@home distributed-computing project, said the firm intends to build unusually deep, long-term relationships with founders. He is focused on AI for healthcare delivery and clinical trials, while seeking founders with integrity and a long-term perspective. Pande argues that AI and machine learning are shifting biology from a discovery-led science toward an engineering discipline by helping model biological systems, identify drug targets and support clinical trials. Yet he said the first-to-third-trial success rate for drugs is only 20%, with failures often linked to animal models that poorly predict human responses. AI models could improve on those models, but their effectiveness is constrained by the shortage of biological data, which cannot be scraped from the internet like text or images. Pande sees proteomics and automated robotic measurements supporting precision medicine (treatments tailored to individuals), while open-source biological atlases and foundation models (large AI systems trained on broad data) could expand access to useful information. He cited Genesis Therapeutics, which emerged from his Stanford lab, and Insitro, founded by Daphne Koller, as examples of companies advancing this work. Pande also said he initially underestimated go-to-market execution and warned against claims that AI will cure everything. In his view, data scarcity, rather than AI itself, remains the central constraint, making data sharing and open-source models important areas to watch.