Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (known as “a16z”) is working on expanding its investments in the healthcare technology sector. The Silicon Valley firm recently hired Julie Yoo as its latest general partner. Now, as a16z’s 17th general partner, she joins the biotech team of Vijay Pande and Jorge Conde and will make investments from the company’s bio fund, which closed on $450 million in 2017, with a focus on broader health tech, life sciences, and synthetic bio.
“Nearly every industry has been digitized, but healthcare is the one place where we still have to pick up the phone and wait,” Yoo said in a recent interview. “We’re at a tipping point.”
Led by general partners—many former founders, CEOs, or CTOs of tech companies with expertise ranging from crypto to biology, and beyond—Yoo is a perfect fit for the a16z team. Co-founder of Kryruus, developer of a routing and scheduling platform for hospital systems, she also served as chief product officer and board director during her eight years with the company. She also served as vice president of the CVS-acquired health management company, Generation Health.
An MIT grad in computer science and pre-medicine, Yoo also earned an MS in genomics from Harvard-MIT HST, and an MBA from MIT Sloan. She’s a Young Global Leader with the World Economic Forum, and has won numerous awards and honors including Rock Health, Health Data Management, and MedTech Boston.
Founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the firm invests in seed- to late-stage tech companies in enterprise, bio and healthcare, consumer, crypto, and fintech. To date, a16z has invested $10 billion across multiple funds.
The health tech team currently has investments in companies including Devoted Health, which assists Medicare beneficiaries across a tech-enabled healthcare platform of physicians, BioAge Labs Apeel, a company working to replace wax coatings, PatientPin, a patient care coordination network, and the biopsy diagnostics platform, Freenome.
“We are an extension of the phrase ‘software is eating the world,’ ” Yoo recently told TechCrunch. “We are focused on software eating care delivery and everything that flows from that.”
