By MATTHEW HOLT

It’s JPM week. That means a ton of startup bros wandering around San Francisco wondering who all the biotech guys and investment banker greyhairs are and why they’re still wearing suits.

Unlikely to be wearing suits are the digital health kids and the VCs they are trying to hunt down. The glory days are long gone. Athenahealth and Venrock are no longer having competing parties (or parties at all) and most of the starving startup kids looking for free booze and food are trying to scrounge invites to law firms who are still charging $1500 an hour for associate time before their clients notice that ChatGPT will do the same for $20 a month.

But venture in digital health continues on, even if much of it is subtexting cramdown M&A, such as last week’s General Catalyst deal funding Transcarent’s takeover of Accolade. But I’m not really here to talk about the digital health VC market per se. 

What I do want to talk about is who is getting VC. This was prompted (to my slow Small Language Model) by a female friend who has been a CEO and was once a star at a fast growing digital health company. She told me that being female was now an active hindrance to raising money. Every time some tech bro on LinkedIn says how they raised $XXm in 12 minutes with no pitch deck, you’ll see lots of female CEOs explode in anger.

You don’t need me to repeat the numbers. Women & minorities find it hard to raise money. First time founders get a massive run around. Even when things were crazy in 2020-2022 the survey of startups I ran showed that it was very hard for early stage companies to raise money. Now it’s the apocalypse.

That’s not to say some female CEOs aren’t raising. Just last week Nema Health run by former Health 2.0 star intern (and now practicing Psychiatrist–which may be more relevant!) Sofia Noori raised $14m Series A to expand its amazing PTSD cure program. Maven’s Kate Ryder raised another $125m late last year to keep expanding their women’s health program, and must be viewing that elusive IPO sooner or later. And at a JPM party I ran into some of Joanna Strober’s team, reminding me that I thought Midi Health had perhaps raised too much money when it pulled down another $60m last year–but apparently it is going gangbusters. There’s also Equip for eating disorders with Kristina Saffran & Erin Parks at the helm (over $95m in so far) and doubtless a few more I’m forgetting. But in general they are the exceptions.

What’s not the exception is the tech bros raising for AI. Obviously the big players here are OpenAI, Anthropic et al pulling down billions to build their AI infrastructure. Anyone with a 401K is probably hoping that all works out given how much of the value of Nvidia, Tesla, Google, Meta, Microsoft & Apple seems to be based on a perhaps mythical AI abundant future. But there’s plenty in health care. Just this week Innovaccer ($275m), Qventus ($105m) & Truveta ($320m) all backed up the truck, all to combine data, AI and hope it will solve some of health care’s troubles.Those CEOs are men. But that’s not what I am complaining about.

You can also be a man and get away with a lot more. Hippocratic AI’s CEO Manjul Shah ran his last company HealthIQ into the ground. He screwed over suppliers, employees and customers to at least the tune of $17m in unpaid bills according to Katie Jennings at Forbes, then took another $170k personally out of the bankrupt company after he’d left. Was he a pariah to the investors who’s lost over $200m? Not in the least. The same investors A16Z and General Catalyst gave him another $50m right away to build an AI nurse chatbot company, and apparently health systems are lining up to buy it according to a podcast he was on with Julie Yoo of A16Z last week. This week Kleiner Perkins (and more) kicked in another $141m.

You might also have noticed that Ali Parsa who went through over $1 billion and crucified all his public market investors too when Babylon Health cratered is also back. His new company – an AI assistant launched with some famous doctors including Shafi Ahmed – is called Quadrivia AI. Funding isn’t clear but Sifted found some filings that indicate a Swedish VC is behind it.There’s also more than a little controversy about whether Babylon’s demise was just a series of bad business decisions or Parsa was lying about the tech. (I had Parsa on a couple of panels and always found him deferential and charming, but you can google Sergei Polevikov’s opinion!)

Look, unlike Lisa Bari at The Health Tech Talk Show, I love the idea of getting AI to answer patients’ questions, call them with information and generally use bots to add “abundance” to the health care workforce. I mean it’s just an extension of what Alex Drane and Eliza (and Silverlink & others) were doing 15 years ago. And there is huge possibility in using AI to actually diagnose and treat. I’m sure Parsa’s new AI bot also has the potential to improve physician care. 

But should it be that easy for guys like Shah and Parsa to immediately get back in the game given the chaos they left in their wake? Shouldn’t VCs have some qualms about anointing as saviours the very people who just screwed over their previous customers, partners, employees and investors?

But I guess we have our answer already. Adrian Aoun took a big swing with Forward and closed it after losing $650m and leaving patients in the lurch with no notice and 200 people unemployed. He was back on a podcast days later saying his investors wanted to give him more to start again. And the biggest loser, chaos agent and conman of recent years, Adam Nuemann of WeWork infamy, was back very soon after with another $350m for yet another real estate startup.

Neumann’s benefactor in the latest round was A16Z’s Mark Andreesen. Andreesen also famously helped fund Trump’s election in 2024. That’s the biggest comeback of someone with no morals, ethics or competence ever.

So I guess at least some VCs have decided, there’s no shame. 

(If you’re wondering about this piece’s title, I am riffing off this blues classic)