Vijay Pande Left a16z's $4B Bio Practice to Run a Two-Person Fund Making Five Bets a Year

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After more than a decade growing a16z's bio and health practice to nearly $4 billion, Pande started VZVC with co-founder Zach Werner. The investment team is just the two of them with no associates, leaning on AI agents for day-to-day operations, and targeting roughly five concentrated investments a year instead of thirty. He argues the binding constraint in AI biotech is high-quality biological data, which unlike text or images cannot be scraped, so VZVC focuses on companies building proprietary datasets and foundation models on top of them.