After running $4 billion at a16z, Vijay Pande is betting small

Vijay Pande left a16z's biotech practice last year to start VZVC — a much smaller fund that's AI-native instead of biotech-heavy. The move is a signal: the era of throwing money at everything is over, and the next wave of biology is shifting from discovery to engineering.

Pande says biology has finally moved past the old discovery phase — the shotgun screening, the blind alleys — and is now being built like software. Open datasets, not walled-off ones, are what will actually let AI transform medicine. The old model hoarded data; the new one needs it shared. He also notes that clinical trials remain brutally expensive, a bottleneck that won't go away just because the science is better.

Why this matters for us: the same shift is coming to other health domains — diabetes management, reproductive care, mental health — and the open-data model means better tools for la gente sooner, not locked behind enterprise walls.