Venture Capital Medical Development
Venture capitalists are investors in thousands of biotech startups, working in genetics, disease treatment, development of new drugs, stem cells, insurance, clinical trials and other areas. These startups face regulatory burdens from bodies like the FDA, while trailing the funding power of big pharma. This has driven venture capitalists to seek roads around regulatory bodies through off-shore clinical trials, FDA-free “Network State” zones in the global south, and political maneuvering to gut regulatory bodies and medical agencies and infrastructure. Their backing of Trump’s second term is significantly motivated by their biotech ambitions, and their model of medical development – as for AI, weapons and crypto – is accelerationism.
Takeover of the FDA
In the first Trump administration, venture capitalists including Peter Thiel tried to get one of Jim O'Neill or Balaji Srinivasan appointed as head of the FDA. Srinivasan, evangelist of the Network State project, advocates for “the medical sovereignty zone, the FDA-free society” and advances “the absolute right for anyone to buy or sell any medical product without third party interference.” These events document a long trajectory of venture capitalists aiming to compromise the FDA through government positions. These positions have now been secured in part because of Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen's support and funding of the Trump campaign.
Venture capitalists have now obtained the coveted role of Deputy Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, and now Acting CDC Director, in Jim O'Neill. Jim O'Neill is a venture capitalist, and has served in many roles throughout the tech fascist conspiracy, including managing director at Peter Thiel's firm Mithril Capital, CEO of The Thiel Foundation, and board member of the Seasteading Institute, which advocates for regulation-free medical experiments.
From reporting by the MIT Tech Review:
"O’Neill is quite well-known in the increasingly well-funded and tight-knit longevity community... his past statements and history working at aging-focused organizations—all of which suggest he indeed believes scientists should be working on ways to extend human lifespan beyond its current limits and thinks unproven therapies should be easier to access. He has also supported the libertarian idea of creating new geographic zones, possibly at sea, in which residents can live by their own rules (including, notably, permissive regulatory regimes for new drugs and therapies)....
O’Neill got further stitched into the longevity field when he spent more than a decade representing Thiel’s interests as a board member of the SENS Research Foundation (SRF), an organization dedicated to finding treatments for aging, to which Thiel was a significant donor...
O’Neill advocated lowering the bar for drug approvals in the US. 'We should reform [the] FDA so that it is approving drugs after their sponsors have demonstrated safety and let people start using them at their own risk,' he said. 'Let’s prove efficacy after they’ve been legalized'... O’Neill was essentially suggesting that drugs be made available after the very first stage of clinical testing, which is designed to test whether a new treatment is safe. These tests are typically small and don’t reveal whether the drug actually works."
As corruption in the government and venture capital has expressed itself in anti-vaccine sentiment and policy, Jim O'Neill's investments through Mithril Capital show a clear conflict of interest. The Mithril-backed biotech startup Invivyd is developing vaccine alternatives, including for Covid-19, stating on its official website "Vaccines can only take us so far. Antibodies are the natural next step. More protection. Less vaccine... We are generating a robust pipeline of monoclonal antibody candidates, which could be used in prevention or treatment of serious viral diseases, starting with COVID-19 and expanding into influenza and other high-need indications." Venture capitalists have direct financial incentive to push anti-vaccine policy and media operations based on this and similar startups.
As in other verticals venture capital focuses on -- crypto, military and media -- there are established monopolies within drug development and other parts of the medical system. These biotech startups compete with the existing medical system in many different dimensions, and can be conceptualized in competition with existing medical bodies. Thus, we see venture capital developing perverse strategies to ensure the success of their investments.
Venture capital firms have increasingly sought to influence policy from their platforms; from a 2023 article from Andreessen Horowitz:
"The FDA needs to double down on this effort and aggressively push to integrate AI as standard practice for data evaluation for medical product review for new applications and post-approval, postmarket review. In order to leverage this tech, the FDA should rapidly recruit new staff that are trained in data and software, AI and ML engineering, data science, and even mechanical engineering. The Digital Health Center of Excellence also needs to spearhead the implementation of AI and advanced software programs internally to facilitate more aggressive integration and efficient product review across the medical product centers. At the same time, Congress must work with the FDA to create a novel Software as Medical Device approval pathway capable of reviewing applications that leverage both foundational LLMs and specialty, smaller models."
Venture capital firms have lobbied the FDA for AI-friendly regulations. A 2024 paper, "Projected Growth in FDA-Approved Artificial Intelligence Products Given Venture Capital Funding", concludes "FDA-approved AI products are expected to grow from 69 in 2022 to 350 in 2035 given the expected funding growth in the coming years. AI is likely to change the practice of diagnostic radiology as new products are developed and integrated into practice. As more AI products are integrated, it may incentivize increased investment for future AI products."
In an April 2025 article, venture capitalist and PayPal Mafia member Joe Lonsdale made another critique of the FDA as a barrier to venture capital investments:
"For decades, the United States has led the world in biotech and pharmaceutical innovation. American firms dominate the global landscape, representing six of the top ten pharmaceutical and seven of the top ten medical device companies by market capitalization.
But dominance is now at risk: not from external sabotage, but from our own regulatory sclerosis. While we drown breakthrough science in red tape, China has a laser-like focus on speeding up scientific progress and the subsequent adoption of innovation. China has embraced CRISPR, leapfrogged the west in cell therapy, developed sophisticated animal models, and rapidly expanded its biotech exports from near-zero in 2016 to nearly 30% of new assets in the world today. Capital is following suit: hedge funds, venture dollars, and strategic acquisitions are pouring into Chinese biotech, responding to a regulatory environment that’s more permissive of experimentation and progress. This is not theoretical. It déjà vu: we have watched this story unfold before across semiconductors, telecommunications, energy, and manufacturing.
If we don’t course-correct, we will cede the biotech future to China and the Chinese Communist Party."
Lonsdale calls to "Curb burdensome regulations to accelerate clinical development: The speed of a clinical trial must become a first-class priority."
In July 2025, in a post called "Engineering Faster Cures at the FDA: New plans to upend America's health bureaucracy", Lonsdale announced "The Abundance Institute, in partnership with Stand Together, is raising $4 million to place a strike team of 15-20 AI-native software engineers, data scientists, and product leaders inside the FDA to accelerate the FDA's latest AI initiatives and bring outsider perspectives on new areas to iterate on fast."
With their privileged position in the Trump administration, venture capital policies and strategies are now embedded in the FDA. Immediately after inauguration, these agendas went into effect, with Nation of Change reporting:
"President Donald Trump’s second term is marked by a sweeping anti-regulatory agenda that threatens to dismantle federal agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Bolstered by the Heritage Foundation’s 'Project 2025' blueprint, Trump’s administration has already issued a flurry of executive orders aimed at weakening regulatory safeguards. With the FDA responsible for drug safety, food regulation, and medical device approvals, these changes could have grave consequences for public health in the United States... Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, has made it clear he intends to overhaul the FDA, stating, 'If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.'"
By January 2025, CDC data was being deleted from its its website, "to comply with the Trump administration’s ongoing attempt to scrub federal agencies of any mention of gender, DEI, and accessibility". This included content on HIV, the Environmental Justice Index, and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry's Social Vulnerability Index, with an Atlantic writer reporting "Several scientists I talked with told me they had heard directly from contacts at the CDC that the agency has directed employees to scrub any mention of 'gender' from its site and the data that it shares there, replacing it with 'sex.'" Attacking and removing DEI initiatives has been a key part of venture capital's agenda.
On February 5 2025, Reuters reported that: "Representatives of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency have been working at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services where they were granted access to agency systems and technology, CMS said on Wednesday. CMS oversees Medicare, the health insurance program for older and disabled Americans, and Medicaid, for lower-income enrollees. Together they provide coverage for over 140 million people in the United States."
DOGE, under Elon Musk, led mass firings in the CDC, with Mother Jones reporting in April 2025 that "thousands of staffers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta received early morning emails asking them to resign. The centers affected included those working on reproductive health, chronic disease, occupational safety, birth defects, smoking, tuberculosis, asthma and air quality, accidental and intentional injury, and prevention of violence and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV." These firings came after the H.H.S announced a "restructuring" for "a total downsizing from 82,000 to 62,000 full-time employees."
The Network State and Biotech
Medical development is a key motive for the Network State.
The author of the Network State, Balaji Srinivasan, was formerly founder of Counsyl, a DNA screening company that was acquired in 2018. His book, a cornerstone of the Network State movement, has medical development as a central theme, discussing "parallel societies" through an "FDA-free zone," "Your Body, Your Choice: the post-FDA Society", and concluding the logic of "life extension good” "leads to a post-FDA society":
"... to actually achieve personal medical sovereignty, your startup society would need some measure of diplomatic recognition from a sovereign outside the US — or perhaps a state within the US. It would need to actually be what we call a network state, as it would need legal recognition from an existing government. For the case of doing it outside the US, your startup society would ride behind, say, the support of Malta’s FDA for a new biomedical regime. For the case of doing it within the US, you’d need a governor who’d declare a sanctuary state for biomedicine. That is, just like a sanctuary city declares that it won’t enforce federal immigration law, a sanctuary state for biomedicine would not enforce FDA writ. With this diplomatic recognition, you could then take the existing American codebase and add one crucial new feature: the absolute right for anyone to buy or sell any medical product without third party interference. Your body, your choice. That’s how you’d get an FDA-free zone."
Echoing a common refrain across venture capital biotech startups, he stated "over the last several decades, the FDA somehow presided over an enormous hike in the costs of drug development even as our computers and our knowledge of the human genome vastly improved."
In 2017, venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel financially supported an experimental herpes vaccine trial in St. Kitts, outside of US regulations. This off-shore experiment was performed without regulatory boundaries and little oversight; further, “the government of St. Kitts and Nevis says it was never notified of the trial, which experimented with live viruses on humans”. The trial was internationally condemned; “‘What they’re doing is patently unethical,’ said Jonathan Zenilman, chief of Johns Hopkin Hopkins Bayview Medical Center’s Infectious Diseases Division. ‘There’s a reason why researchers rely on these protections. People can die.’”
In 2019, Pronomos Capital was founded, with funding from Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan, Marc Andreessen and Joe Lonsdale. Pronomos has funded a number of Network State sites - “new cities” and unregulated zones - with a primary goal to secure locations where they can host clinical trials without FDA or other regulatory oversight. Read more about the Network State here.
In Roatàn, Honduras, the Pronomos-backed Network State of Próspera has become a key site of venture capital clinical trials. They have adopted a permanent longevity and biohacking hub within Pròspera called Infinita, formerly Vitalia City. Vitalia began as an extended “pop-up” city with conferences, summits and community gatherings centered around gene editing and unregulated medical experimentation. An investigative article from The New Republic explores the motivations of biohackers and the progression of Pròspera's longevity city over the course of a year. The timeline of investigation includes the split between founders Laurence Ion and Niklas Anzinger of Vitalia, and the subsequent rebranding of Vitalia to Infinita, while Laurence Ion relocated to San Fransisco to launch his own longevity-focused hub, Viva City. The reporter spoke to those involved in Infinita's clinics:
"I met Tristan Roberts, a co-founder of Minicircle who left the company...In Roberts’s account, Vitalia’s downfall came from the sociopathic personalities it attracted and their death-avoidant mission."
I. Glenn Cohen, the director of Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, stated:
“To me, this model is a solution for a small number of wealthy people who want access to things they believe are going to work, not a model to find out what actually works, and to make those things completely bulletproof, correctly proved, and then diffused to the population.”
Despite the growing concerns over limited governance and bespoke medical practices in Próspera and Infinita City, Montana, one of the least regulated states, has enacted "Right-To-Try" legislation for the purpose of delivering experimental drugs and longevity trial access to patients in the U.S., championed by venture capitalists like Niklas Anzinger and Adam Gries- both investors in Network State projects.
Próspera -- now becoming a model in many other countries and states -- is embedded in a libertarian, free-market view that is reliant upon “crypto cities” and blockchain technology to “accelerate” the speed of medical trials while developing "on-the-ground" services and procedures, such as implants through Symbiont Labs and "3D bioprinters” through Life SI, an Argentinian-based 3D bioprinting company with close ties to Próspera. Since the current libertarian president of Argentina, Javier Milei, took office in 2023, he has gutted the government, regulatory bodies and economic system, plunging the country into deep poverty while welcoming Network State projects Aleph and Forma City – likely precursors to medical experimentation sites.
Viva's manifesto states:
"We are on the brink of being able to bring aging under medical control. We have successfully decoded the human genome, laying bare the blueprint of human life. Control over our biology has been expanding. We have already seen dramatic results in slowing down or even reversing aging by ~30% in lab animals using dozens of pharmaceutical interventions. This provides compelling evidence that it is possible to influence the aging process... Viva city is a moonshot to make death optional by coming together in a new city within a special regulatory zone. A multi-jurisdictional city fostering drug development at warp speed: 4 months to get to market, instead of 10+ years.
The residents coordinate toward freedom from disease and suffering, striving for vitality instead of degeneration & death. To achieve this we need Special Jurisdictions where we have medical freedom. There are thousands of Special Economic Zones in existence, but most have a few special tax & customs rules. We need medical freedom to enable self-experimentation and warp-speed drug development in a sandbox, without requiring permission from the broader society."
They posit this model can bring drugs to market "in 4 months instead of 10+ years, spending $1.0 million instead of $2.4 billion."
Inside the Pròspera compound are three different medical clinics: Minicircle, GARM and Symbiont Labs. These clinics operate with impunity in order to bring “human enhancement” and AI-driven “solutions” to the natural aging process, referred to as “radical life extension.” One startup, Bootstrap Bio, focused on genetically edited embryos or "superbabies", is planning to conduct experiments within the Network State of Próspera, "where the company could potentially avoid US regulations," starting in 2026 or 2027, and has appeared at their events.
Preventive, another startup funded by Sam Altman and Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, is working on genetically engineered babies. The Wall Street Journal reports "Editing genes in embryos with the intention of creating babies from them is banned in the U.S. and many countries. Preventive has been searching for places to experiment where embryo editing is allowed, including the United Arab Emirates, according to correspondence reviewed by The Wall Street Journal… [According to CEO Lucas Harrington] Preventive is compelled to work outside the U.S. because the Food and Drug Administration is prohibited from reviewing applications for human trials involving embryo editing.” As Brian Armstrong's crypto company, Coinbase, is an investor in Próspera, Próspera is a likely site for these trials.
The Honduran medical community has denounced Minicircle in Próspera, expressing that these trials “could have serious consequences for Honduran residents who agree to participate in these experiments, since they work with elements that require extreme care, such as stem cells, and could also cause environmental damage to the island if the waste is dumped into the water or another environment.” Even though the Pròspera trials are under investigation, these Network State clinics remain in operation and continue to spread throughout the globe; Pròspera has announced that they are extending their model to multiple sites in Africa. Worldcoin, the Sam Altman project, is famous for collecting the biometrics of Kenyans, scanning their eyeballs in return for small amounts of cryptocurrency. In early 2025, Worldcoin opened operations in the Philippines, host to the Network State project Metropolis.
Another venture capital vehicle for medical development is Zuzalu. Ethereum CEO, Vitalik Buterin, merged the crypto conference model with Network State enthusiasts for this long-term, residency-based “pop-up” city in Montenegro, starting in March of 2023. This two-month city brought in people like Bryan Johnson, the aging-obsessed billionaire of the “Don’t Die” movement. It became a catalyst for a flourishing “longevity” community with dozens of global conferences and “pop-up” cities. Their goal, according to Laurence Ion (co-creator of Zuzalu), is to “make death optional.”
The success of Zuzalu has paved the way for more pop-up cities including “Zu-Villages”, “Edge Cities” and summits, hosted in the Georgian mountains, Dublin, Thailand, Berlin, California, Argentina and many more regions. These events integrate longevity, biohacking, human augmentation, and virtual reality in their quest to extend their own lives beyond current human capabilities. Like the Montenegro pop-up city, Zu-Villages and Edge Cities are funded by Ethereum grants and utilize cryptocurrency as their preferred financial system. Decentralization, for them, is the key to solving economic and regulatory barriers to biotech innovation.
Another Peter Thiel-funded project has been the much-anticipated Enhanced Games. This controversial event is set to take place in May 2026 in Las Vegas as an alternative to "anti-doping" sports and traditional Olympic protocols that ban the use of performance enhancing drugs for athletes. Participants in Enhanced Games are expected to use performance enhancing treatments and testosterone replacement therapies to break world records and compete to win $500,000 for each event and $1 million to any athlete who breaks a World Record. This event has been condemned by multiple professional sports organizations, including Sport Ireland, UK Sport and Aquatics AG, while the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, the World Anti-Doping Agency and the International Olympic Committee "issued blunt warnings that allowing peds (performance enhancing drugs) in any form was dangerous."
Inside Venture Capital Biotech Portfolios
The venture capital medical infrastructure is expansive and growing. Within ten years, left unchecked, it could supplant, absorb, replace or destroy key parts of the world medical system, and usher in an era of profoundly degraded medical ethics.
Andreessen Horowitz, just one venture firm, lists over 90 portfolio companies in biotech and health. Andreessen Horowitz has IPOed or sold close to 20 of these companies, including Cardiogram ("AI for preventative monitoring based on consumer wearables"), Rigetti ("Building cloud-deployed quantum computers to solve humanity's most pressing and valuable problems"), BioAge ("Extending healthy human lifespan by developing treatments that target the molecular causes of human aging"), and Patch Biosciences ("Machine-designed sequences for safer, more effective gene therapy").
Their investments are wide-ranging, envisioning a future medical system under their control, in which the field of medicine operates as a network of venture capital firms and startups. In this section, we look at a selection of biotech categories and their startups to provide a picture of this system. Investments in fertility and eugenics startups can be found separately in a document on this site.
Accelerated Clinical Trials and Medical Experiments
Accelerated drug development and clinical trials is a consistent theme across venture capital investments.
In a 2024 article from Andreessen Horowitz, firm partners stated: "we should also look to ways where AI can improve the probability that promising biomedical research can traverse the so-called 'valley of [developmental] death' to successfully reach clinical trials and ultimately market approval. One such avenue involves incorporating virtual animal models that can pinpoint compounds with better translational pharmacokinetics or those with potential toxicities, ultimately requiring fewer real-world animal studies... AI will infiltrate the entire spectrum of 'Jobs to be Done' across drug discovery and development—from hypothesis generation to clinical trials, and beyond."
Startups like a16z-backed Formation Bio are promising accelerated development through clinical trials. They state “Our trials are run in-house by our top tier clinical operations functions, including patient recruitment, site management, and study monitoring…. By taking a radically more efficient approach across the drug development lifecycle, we are moving faster than ever before toward bringing treatments to patients.”
Another a16z company, Topography Health is "accelerating drug development by activating clinical research sites at scale". Inductive Bio, funded by Lux Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, is "Making ML accessible for biopharma to design and optimize drug candidates faster." Also funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Alleviate Health is "An AI voice agent for clinical trial recruitment," promising better and faster conversion of clinical trials: "Our Agents are powered by a library of >150,000 conversations for messaging to maximize conversion and response rates."
In January 2025, Andreessen Horowitz partnered with Eli Lilly to create a $500 million venture fund: "Managed by a16z Bio + Health, the Fund will deploy up to $500 million to invest in companies at all stages – from company creation to growth. The Fund will focus on advancing the development of new medicines, enabling novel modality platforms, and scaling emerging health technologies" as Eli Lilly will "provide biotech startups with access to world-class pre-clinical and clinical drug development talent and resources. "
Lux Capital is a venture capital firm rapidly becoming a key biotech player, and investing in a number of companies promising to accelerate clinical trials. Trial Library advertises itself as "The leading AI-powered solution for recruitment and retention in clinical trials," promoting "accelerated recruitment to clinical trials" with over 320 clinics participating in its program. The site includes searches for clinical trials by location, and offers pre-screening services to "accelerate patient identification and navigation". Paradigm Biopharmaceuticals focuses on late-stage drug development, seeking reduced R&D cost, reduced development timeline, and avoiding phase 1 clinical trials. Their initial focus is on osteoarthiritis, while also exploring heart failure, acute respitory distress syndrome and others. Lux's website blubs "Paradigm is building the platform to empower the future of clinical trials. We’re transforming a fragmented and inefficient approach to clinical research into a high-performance trial ecosystem. Our platform will accelerate recruitment, speed study-related insights, automate operations, and make it easy for any physician anywhere to evaluate patients for clinical trials."
Science 37, funded by Lux Capital and BlackRock, is another startup focused on clinical trials, offering in-home clinical trials to patients so that clinical trials can reach more eligible patients. Trials are administered by registered nurses trained by Science 37.
Founders Fund, Peter Thiel's venture capital firm, has identified accelerated clinical trials are a priority, stating in their investment thesis "it simply takes far too much time and money before a company has any real indication that a drug might work with animal/human trials fantastically expensive despite the help of computer modeling." Peter Thiel famously funded unregulated herpes vaccine trials in the Caribbean. The same company ran vaccine trials in Illinois, leading to a criminal investigation by the FDA in 2017: "The US Food and Drug Administration has launched a criminal investigation into a herpes vaccine trial carried out by a microbiologist who injected participants with his experimental live herpes simplex virus (HSV-2) vaccine in Illinois hotel rooms, with no apparent safety oversight, consent forms, or ethics approval."
Founders Fund has invested in several startups in this vein. Teckro advertises "Clinical trial technology as forward-thinking as your clinical trial". The platform leverages AI, mobile tools, experiences for patients and practitioners, and more. It claims close to 20,000 clinical sites, and over 23% higher recruitment rate.
Founders Fund is a key investor in Neuralink, aiming to bring experimental brain-computer implants to humans. Neuralink came under fire in allegations that its animal trials resulted in excessive suffering and death. Neuralink’s ambitions to rapidly implant brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) resulted in “gruesome” animal subjects testing, leading to the euthanasia of up to a dozen primates in one trial. While Neuralink’s CEO, Elon Musk, publicly denied claims that the animals died due to the implants, investigations suggest otherwise. In 2022, Neuralink came “under federal investigation for potential animal-welfare violations amid internal staff complaints that its animal testing is being rushed, causing needless suffering and deaths.” The investigation focused on “violations of the Animal Welfare Act, which governs how researchers treat and test some animals.” In 2023, regulators stated it found no compliance breaches. Yet, since Neuralink’s inception, the company has been responsible for the deaths of over 1,500 animal subjects and “current and former Neuralink employees say the number of animal deaths is higher than it needs to be for reasons related to Musk’s demands to speed research,” some citing “a lack of preparation by a testing staff working in a pressure-cooker environment.” This raises significant concerns about the application of venture capitalist’s self-professed accelerationist ideology to medical testing.
The focus on accelerated clinical trials goes hand-in-hand with large venture investments in drug and treatment discovery and development, most harnessing AI technologies. For example, Maze Therapeutics, funded by General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz, is focused on "breakthough precision medicines... designed to imitate the effects of rare, naturally occurring, protective genetic variants and help halt the progression and potentially reverse the effects of kidney disease."
Genesis Molecular AI, funded by Andreessen Horowitz and BlackRock, is "using the industry’s most advanced molecular AI platform to unlock tough protein targets and invent medicines with unprecedented potency and selectivity"; using the acronym GEMS for "Generative AI for Drug Discovery". Most recently, they released an AI foundation model in collaboration with Nvidia. Dyno is funded by Andreessen Horowitz and Lux Capital, and is building genetic technologies that enable "gene therapy developers to target the brain, eye and muscle with field-leading performance." Mana Bio, from Andreessen Horowitz and the Israel Institute of Technology, is focused on AI-based drug delivery, "focusing on gene therapy including DNA and RNA-based therapeutics, and vaccines." Insitro, funded by Bezos Expeditions, Andreessen Horowitz, and BlackRock, uses machine learning and big data to discover new medicines, currently focusing on metabolic disease, neurodegenerative conditions, and ALS.
This is only a small selection of the drug development and clinical trial startups funded by venture capital. Yet it demonstrates how venture capitalists construct markets, having drug discovery platforms, drug manufacturing and clinical trial development, facilities and home administration, and even FDA-free zones, giving them vertical and horizontal control over the entire drug development process.
Administration and Insurance
While there are a number of startups that operate through extreme measures and "moonshot" programs, there are also more measured approaches. One article from Andreessen Horowitz, titled "How We Live Longer", notes "The most impactful way to fix healthcare is through improving the consumer experience... If you fix consumer’s healthcare experience, you can make it easier and more enjoyable for people to monitor their health (nearly 30% of Americans don’t see a primary care provider), to take their medication (50% of Americans don’t take their prescribed medications), and to make healthier lifestyle choices (88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy). While these changes sound simple—and would add many years to Americans’ lives—no healthcare company has been able to help us make these changes."
A number of venture-backed startups focus on the administration, bureaucracy and infrastructure of care, such as Alchemy, which is building "on-site pharmacies" with "the entire physical, clinical, and digital infrastructure needed to operate and grow best-in-class 340B programs."
There are a raft of startups dedicated to insurance management, including FurtherAI, one of A16z's newest investments in the insurance space, providing AI software for insurers, automating large parts of the process and claiming to cut audit time by 45%. Y Combinator is also an investor. Tendo provides "end-to-end" patient care software platforms. Founders Fund is also an investor in ZocDoc, a marketplace for users to search for local doctors and for doctors to list their practice. Sword Health is an AI-powered platform for physical therapy, while Oscar is a medical insurance company with individual, family and small business plans.
Investments in insurance companies and insurance logistics are common, another area of conflict with the existing medical system and public health insurance. In a 2015 Andreessen Horowitz article, the firm states:
"Insurance is all about distributing risk. With dramatic advances in software and data, shouldn’t the way we buy and experience our insurance products change dramatically? Software will rewrite the entire way we buy and experience our insurance products — medical, home, auto, and life... Historically, we’ve seen mutual insurance companies (insurance companies owned by policyholders) and stock insurance companies (insurance companies owned by shareholders). We expect to see more crowdsourced insurance companies, just as we’ve seen in other parts of the financial system. Crowdsourcing works great for personal loans, student loans, small business loans — why not for insurance?... Yes, some of these will require changes to existing regulations. But some of the regulations were designed for a different era. The world has changed. Let’s help the stodgy insurance ecosystem change with it."
Milu is a health records management system, as well as advertising to employers: "When employees connect their electronic health records, our platform notifies them when there’s an opportunity to get the care they need, save money, or use an existing benefit. It’s that simple." Thatch is another health benefits platform, leveraging the Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement (ICHRA). It advertises to employers: "You set a budget, and your employees spend it the way that works best for them." Headway lets users find therapists and psychiatrists that accept their insurance.
Venture capital's moves into the administrative and bureaucratic layer of the health care system, including insurance, promises to give them more control, access, data and surveillance. Every startup they have that collects and processes health information gives them a new level of analytics. Every startup that puts venture capital into a position of administrative power gives them a "control plane" over the medical system, created by software and artificial intelligence tools.
There are also startups which focus on at-home care; a16z has stated "The way we deliver healthcare has changed enormously over the last century, shifting from house calls by doctors to institutionalized settings like hospitals and clinics. But now that trend has started to shift again, as some of the care we get in the hospitals and clinics has been 'unbundled' back towards home settings for chronically ill patients or seniors." Honor is one such startup, which provides the HomeInstead service, including Alzheimer's care, end-of-life care, meal prep, medication reminders and more. It boasts a network of 100,000 trained care professionals, in every US state. Another is Accolade, calling itself "One Place for Health", providing access to primary care, preventative care, urgent care, and mental health care. It claims to have a network of top physicians with an average of 15 years of experience, as well as nurses and health coaches; it is marketed to employers as a route to "healthier employees". Venture capital offers home health marketplaces, on-demand home health services, home care for mental illness, physical exams, in-home IVF treatments, and more.
Longevity
Venture capitalists have significant investments in longevity, seen across the Network State, the Próspera colony in Honduras, the Don't Die movement, and floating pop-up cities like Viva City and Edge City. More information about the biotech Network State projects can be found on this site.
Longevity is also a key theme across their core portfolios. Longevity startups are a growing asset class. According to the Longevity Investors Conference, "In 2024, global investment in longevity companies surged to $8.49 billion, marking a substantial 220% increase from the previous year... The United States continues to dominate this sector, accounting for a vast majority of deal volume."
Investments in longevity occur across the entire venture capital field and crypto elite. Khosla Ventures is offering therapeutic plasma exchange through the company Circulate, which has stated a 2.6 year reduction in "biological age". Blueprint, Bryan Johnson's company, offers snake oil treatments from "Longevity Mix" to collagen, olive oil and recipes.
Founders Fund is an investor in Until, a cryro-preservation startup to "pause biological time". Lux Capital is also an investor. They have raised over $100 million to date. They state:
"Whole-body cryopreservation is often imagined as science fiction. We see it as a long-term clinical goal made tractable by solving real problems, one biological system at a time... scaling to whole-body preservation introduces new challenges: non-vascular tissues, non-uniform cooling, and above all, the brain. Each demands new architectures of control and a deeper integration of biology, physics, and engineering. We don’t claim it works. Yet. But the barriers are technical, and we have traction."
Retro Bio, funded by Sam Altman, is a company aiming to add 10 years to the human lifespan be reversing age-related diseases. They are in the process of raising $1 billion in financing. They are currently "testing a pill for a younger brain... by the end of 2025, Retro will have dosed its first trial patient with an experimental pill called RTR242."
Altos Labs is a larger venture capital endeavor, with $5.56 billion in funding provided by investors including Joe Lonsdale’s 8VC and Jeff Bezos. There is speculation that Altos is moving closer to clinical trials. NewLimit is founded by Brian Armstrong of Coinbase; founded in 2022, it has raised almost a quarter of a billion dollars. NewLimit seeks to "reprogram cells to younger states", with a "20-year ambition is to significantly extend human healthspan."
Venture capitalists are exploring a broad range of approaches to longevity; Andreessen Horowitz writing in 2024: "A few years ago, we wrote an article predicting that a consumer health company could become the biggest company in the world. More recently, we’ve argued that building new companies with magical consumer experiences that inspire behavior change is the most powerful way to extend our lifespans." They invested in Function, a blood-testing startup offering over 160 lab tests with at-home blood draws that scan for indicators pertaining to immunity, liver, blood, pancreas, brain health, biological age and more. This shows how biotech startups are also data collection surfaces. Function Health acquired Ezra in May 2025, "a Full Body MRI with an FDA-cleared AI that cuts scan time from 60 minutes to 22 minutes, and $1500 to $499."
Arda Therapeutics is funded by Eli Lilly Company Foundation and Andreessen Horowitz, "taking aim at chronic diseases and aging by depleting the pathogenic cells that drive these conditions. Their approach starts by using single-cell data to identify pathogenic cells to target and how to target them. They then design therapies to eliminate these - and only these - cells."
BioAge Labs is a publicly traded company with a market cap of almost $400 million at time of writing. Andreessen Horowitz led or participated in its Series A, Series B, Series C and Series D rounds. Khosla Ventures is another investor. BioAge is working to "identify the molecular mediators of aging and disease."
In addition to their startups, tech elites fund "non-profits" that are focused on funding research in longevity and aging. One such foundation is the Methuselah Foundation, advertising "Making 90 the New 50 by 2030". The website's homepage shows images of people who appear to be 70ish years of age, reverse-aging into their early 20s. The foundation has been funded by Peter Thiel and Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum and a key player in the Network State. The Methuselah Foundation funds a large number of research projects, and has a venture capital arm that invests in biotech startups.
An early development in tech longevity projects was Larry Ellison's founding of the Ellison Medical Foundation in 1997, focused on aging and global infectious disease. The Foundation ran for over 15 years, and was funded by Ellison and through ownership of Oracle shares. The Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars. The Foundation's website, still live, states "Significant breakthroughs in understanding the basic biological processes that underlie aging and age-related diseases are the best hope we have for achieving genuine prevention or amelioration of age-related debilitation and disease." The Foundation funded hundreds of researchers in these disciplines, and also gave money to a dizzying amount of medical institutions, including the American Federation for Aging Research, multiple institutions of Harvard Medical School, many universities across the US, the Institute for Genomic Research, the Mayo Clinic, the National Foundation of Infectious Diseases, the International Longevity Center, the American Aging Association, and many others. The Ellison Medical Foundation has since generated an additional appendage called The Ellison Medical Institute, focusing strictly on "research" as opposed to grant funding. It is notable that venture capitalists have far-ranging investments in oncology research and development; cancer is one of the largest factors in human death.
Oracle is a behemoth in the health space, pioneering the use of artificial intelligence tools in medical research as a top priority. Its customers include St Joseph's Health, Emory University, Emirates Health Services, the Mayo Clinic, the University of Tennessee Medical Center, Catholic Relief Services, BlueCross BlueShield, and many others around the world.
Genetic and Genomic Engineering, CRISPR
One of the areas of greatest concern to the public is venture capital investments in genetic and genomic engineering. While many of these technologies can positively impact humanity, the context of who, why, and how these technologies is being used are important considerations.
CRISPR is revolutionizing the medical sector. Bill Gates has played an important role in its development, funding Editas Medicine, a significant early player. The National Human Genome Research Institute states "CRISPR (short for 'clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats') is a technology that research scientists use to selectively modify the DNA of living organisms." CRISPR has applications in agricultural development, disease prevention and treatment, genetic disorders, gene therapy, and more. Many venture capital funded biotech startups seek to capitalize on these developments.
In 2019, Andreessen Horowitz wrote:
"The new wave of technologies being used to rewrite our genetic code is becoming one of the most powerful therapeutic arsenals of all time... The latest generation of CRISPR tools coming online are truly pushing us into the realm of precision genome engineering. Not only have these nucleases been better optimized and refined by the massive scientific and engineering community, the genome 'developer ecosystem' is now building totally new functionality on top of this platform.... No disease will be left untreatable... There has never been a more exciting time for gene therapy innovation."
One company in this space is Ultima Genomics, funded by a cluster of venture capitalists who collaborate often, including Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Ultima is focused on reducing the costs of DNA sequencing. In spring 2025, they announced they will "provide three trillion DNA sequencing reads (equivalent to approximately 9,000 human genomes at 30x coverage) free of charge to researchers across the United States and Canada." They offer sequencer hardware, the UG 100, as well as the needed software, and focus on whole genome sequencing and oncology.
Founders Fund is also an investor in Synthego, “the first and only provider of Full Stack Genome Engineering solutions”; “pioneering products and services to accelerate CRISPR-based cell and gene therapy development.” They announced their latest $110 million funding round, led by Founders Fund, in August 2025.
eGenesis is funded by Lux Capital, Khosla Ventures, ARCH Venture Partners and others, with the goal of creating a "multiplex gene editing and genome engineering platform to transform solid organ and therapeutic cell transplantation for the treatment of serious diseases." They have successfully performed organ transplants from a CRISPR-modified pig kidney. Scribe Therapeutics is engineering CRISPR-based therapeutics, stating: "You could prevent common diseases by calibrating your genome. You could unshackle yourself from inherited conditions, predispositions, and lifetime treatment. Genetic medicines would be safe and accessible for everyone – beyond rare diseases." "We’ve engineered purpose-built CRISPR-based therapeutics to have the broadest possible impact, starting with the leading cause of death globally — cardiometabolic disease." Elegen offers "Automated, miniaturized, cell-free DNA production... high-quality DNA products at speeds and costs superior to market-leading gene synthesis suppliers who still rely on cell-based cloning."
These are just some of the startups and companies working in genetics, gene editing, and genetic and genome engineering. This is particularly concerning in light of eugenicist ideologies present across venture capital. While many of these startups involve legitimate areas of inquiry, there are obvious ethical concerns about how venture capitalists are approaching medical development.
Amassing enough capital to invest in life-altering scientific research should not lend venture capitalists authority over the medical establishment or its ethical mandates. They are not doctors, are trying to dismantle the FDA, and show a consistent disregard for human life, as well as willingness to go to extreme lengths to perform unregulated clinical trials. The implications of their accelerationist ideology for human trials is deeply troubling. Further, the intertwining of venture capital in weapons development, warfare, genocide, eugenics programs, colonization, exploitation, and alarming misogyny and anti-blackness, as well as their radical ideologies, fundamentally compromise their medical development.
The medical profession should be free to develop technologies without the specter of tech fascism, with medical development led by ethical bodies with protective regulations, oversight and corruption control.
Implications for Human Rights
The history of biological and medical experimentation abounds with instances of abominable acts of cruelty inflicted on humans in the name of progress. The “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male”, conducted over 40 years, did not get informed consent from study participants, who were not offered treatment even after it became widely available. According to Tuskegee University, “Between the start of the study in 1932 and 1947, the date when penicillin was determined as a cure for the disease, dozens of men had died and their wives, children and untold number of others had been infected.”
The case of Henrietta Lacks also stands out in history: “Lacks was being treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins University in 1951 when doctors removed cells from her tumor without her knowledge or permission. Those cells — now known as HeLa cells — had remarkable properties that allowed them to be endlessly reproduced, and they have since been used for a variety of scientific breakthroughs, including research about the human genome and the development of the polio and COVID-19 vaccines… Lacks' descendants have argued that she and other Black women were ‘preyed on’ by a group of white doctors in the 1950s and that her family was never compensated for the use of her genetic material, which made such profitable scientific advancements possible.”
Considering the fascist nature of the venture capital conspiracy, we must also consider the Nazi medical experiments, documented here by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Returning to a time of degeneration of ethics and morals in the treatment of human subjects is not a path humanity can risk. In this environment of global war, rising fascism, border and migration crisis – and venture capital’s participation in it all – these efforts in unregulated human testing require serious investigation.