T. A. McCann

Seed VC isn’t just in a downturn—it’s facing extinction unless it evolves fast. Great read from Rob Go & David Beisel at NextView Ventures... - YC and mega-funds now dominate the early-stage landscape, squeezing out traditional seed investors - Power law thinking has gone mainstream—everyone’s chasing trillion-dollar outliers - AI isn’t helping seed VCs—it’s raising the stakes, crowding the field, and disrupting VC itself - The middle of the market has collapsed, and excess profits are gone - Hope isn’t a strategy—seed needs a new model, now Link here... https://lnkd.in/ek2MZGhm And if you like this topic, I wrote a piece on venture bifurcating into inception funds and mega funds here: https://lnkd.in/eJz5DmX6 #ai #venturecapital #vc

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What actually makes a scientist-founder fundable at pre-seed? This was one of my questions for Julie Wolf, Ph.D. Wolf, Partner at 2048 Ventures, on the very first Bio Founder GPS Podcast conversation 🎙️🎉 Julie has a unique perspective on this. A scientist by training, Julie helped launch SOSV SF & NY (Fka IndieBio) in NYC, has worked closely with founders at the earliest stages, and now invests in pre-seed and seed companies at 2048 Ventures. We explored questions that almost every technical founder eventually has to wrestle with: 1. What does a strong fundraising process actually look like? 2. How do investors think about “pre-seed” vs. “seed” in today’s market? 3. What signals matter when you don’t yet have meaningful revenue? 4. How do you show founder-market fit before product-market fit? 5. And what does a pitch deck really need to prove? If you’re a science-driven founder and thinking about your first institutional raise, I think you’ll get a lot out of this one. Huge thank you to Julie for being the very first guest and for sharing such a thoughtful, practical perspective. Link in the comments. And if you’d like to follow along, subscribe to the podcast on your platform of choice - just search for "Bio Founder GPS"

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Matt Holt, former New Mountain Capital executive, is exploring a $30 billion deal to combine five health tech startups into a single platform called Thoreau. The venture would set out to simplify and integrate services across payers, providers and data — and if completed, it would rank among the largest private equity-backed health tech companies ever. Time will tell if this massive consolidation ever gets completed or translates into real value — or if it's just another bet on scale.

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🚨This week on The Dart Board, meet Mike Knoop, co-founder of Zapier, ARC Prize Foundation, and the newly announced Ndea AI Lab. In this conversation, we explore Mike’s transition from scaling Zapier into a generational company to co-founding an AI research lab focused on rethinking the path to artificial general intelligence. We discuss why pure deep learning may be a dead end for AGI, how ARC has become one of the most important unsolved benchmarks in AI, and why combining program synthesis with neural networks could unlock a new era of innovation. We also talk about leadership, thinking bigger, adaptation through technological shifts, and what it would mean to truly maximize the rate of human progress. 🎧 Links to listen... Spotify: https://lnkd.in/ggWu54QQ Apple: https://lnkd.in/guKYN22K

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Yesterday's seed market was built on three constraints: Products were hard to build. Traction took time. VCs were hesitant to underwrite day zero risk. Those constraints created a unique market. Today, all three are dissolving.

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𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐡𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠. Energy everywhere. Rows and rows of companies showcasing innovation. But founders often leave with something unexpected: Confusion. 𝗕𝗲𝗰𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗿𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝗲 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝘁 𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲. Booth. Speaking panel. Networking dinners. Investor meetings. In the conversation, Saul W. Marquez and I talked about how founders treat conferences like a marketing lottery. Talk to enough people and something might happen. But the companies that win at conferences do something different. They arrive with a clear strategy: Who they want to meet. What message they want remembered. What outcome they want after the event. Otherwise the conference becomes activity without traction. I wrote more about this in the LinkedIn newsletter connected to this episode. 📩Read the newsletter and see how founders can turn conference conversations into real partnerships.

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🚨 Big news from the frontlines of healthcare innovation: Ellipsis Health just announced a $45M funding round led by Salesforce Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and CVS Health Ventures—and it’s making headlines in the Wall Street Journal. We’ve been proud backers of Ellipsis Health at E12 Ventures because they’ve taken a bold, contrarian approach: instead of chasing efficiency at the cost of patient experience, they’ve built an emotionally intelligent AI that brings humanity back to healthcare. Meet Sage — the AI Care Manager trained on millions of real clinical conversations and powered by Ellipsis’ proprietary Empathy Engine. It delivers 24/7 support to patients with complex needs — the same patients who typically slip through the cracks because of capacity constraints and staffing shortages. This is a huge leap forward. Instead of forcing trade-offs between quality and scale, Sage shows we can have both. It’s not just automating workflows — it’s reimagining what scalable, empathetic care looks like. Strategic investors across the ecosystem — payers (CVS), platforms (Salesforce), and deep tech VCs (Khosla) — all recognize the same thing: emotionally intelligent AI is the next frontier in healthcare. Congrats to the Ellipsis team — thrilled to be on this journey with you. #AI #HealthcareInnovation #EllipsisHealth #EmpathyEngine #VentureCapital #DigitalHealth #E12Ventures https://lnkd.in/giVckKyq

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The longer you spend in health care x tech, the more you learn about human preferences in the wild bc you are exposed to thousands of experiments. What has become abundantly clear to me is that people really do respect and desire experts in their care. What they have lost all patience for is conflating that with the right to take away their own agency to make decisions. Look at the companies growing fastest with DTC patient acquisition or business models. This is one of their core insights. This is NOT always the “fault” of the experts even though it’s typically labeled paternalism - in fact those DTC companies all have physicians in leadership positions and in the care delivery model too! The agency issue is embedded in how we decide what care gets paid for, how we regulate, institutional policy and care pathways, and what exposes the experts to legal risk. Unless we fix this as a core industry principle, we are not giving many people the kind of care they want and will “engage” with over time.

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Doximity just released a free AI scribe for US clinicians, accelerating commoditization/the race to the bottom. Their product won’t integrate into the EHR like Abridge, but it’ll be interesting to see how much it impacts their ability to acquire customers, drive usage and maintain retention. This is the start of a trend that will continue across every vertical market. Counterpositioning with free products to undercut upstarts and incumbents alike. Buckle up. Your margin is someone else’s opportunity.

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Harpoon Ventures + Black Flag is teaming up with Microsoft for Startups to provide founders with access to up to $250,000 in Azure credits, empowering builders to scale faster, train models more efficiently, and access world-class AI infrastructure. What’s included: ⚡Up to $250K in Azure credits (usable across Azure OpenAI, Grok 3, Llama 4, and more) 💻On-demand GPU VMs for model training and fine-tuning 🧠Access to GitHub Enterprise + Microsoft 365 Business Premium 🤝Dedicated Microsoft technical + GTM support This partnership is designed to give deep-tech and dual-use founders the tools and resources they need to win. Because when they win, we all win. 🏴‍☠️

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Second-Time Founders Don’t Fundraise Like You - Here’s Why They do not send decks. They do not ask for intros. They raise in half the time and walk into the room with leverage you never see coming. In this new issue of HealthVC, we break down how experienced founders: Pre-bake the round long before the launch Sequence LPs to build layered momentum Use co-invest dynamics to reduce friction Manufacture FOMO before the first call is made If you’ve ever felt like your fundraising process is slower, harder, or more uncertain than others, this explains why. 📬 Read it now on Substack 

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linkedin algo, show this to people interested in mental health startups. we recently released our report on the state of mental health innovation. Let me know what you'd like to see in our next report!

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Vine Ventures, L.P. has raised $250+ million, invested in some amazing startups, and recruited an amazing group of investors. But what is their origin story? How did Daniel Povitsky and Eric Reiner start the fund? What were their first steps? And who was the first person to believe in them? Link to the full episode in the comments

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Amazing piece of research from Greg Yap and the Menlo Ventures team. Greg Yap - I think one thing this piece missed is how deep integration of AI into healthcare products like diagnostics (e.g., Valar Labs) and surgical robotics (e.g., Remedy Robotics, Proprio) is enabling better, cheaper, and faster care. cc: DCVC DCVC Bio Anirudh Joshi Viswesh Krishna David Bell Jake Sganga Gabriel Jones Samuel R. Browd, M.D., Ph.D. Alan Cohen

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Harpoon Ventures + Black Flag is teaming up with Microsoft for Startups to provide founders with access to up to $250,000 in Azure credits, empowering builders to scale faster, train models more efficiently, and access world-class AI infrastructure. What’s included: ⚡ Up to $250K in Azure credits (usable across Azure OpenAI, Grok 3, Llama 4, and more) 💻 On-demand GPU VMs for model training and fine-tuning 🧠 Access to GitHub Enterprise + Microsoft 365 Business Premium 🤝 Dedicated Microsoft technical + GTM support This partnership is designed to give deep-tech and dual-use founders the tools and resources they need to win. To keep pace with an increasingly hostile near peer environment, we need the complete resource stack: political, capital, technological. This is a great addition.

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Most venture validation is theater. Founders and studio operators spend months building decks, running fake customer conversations, collecting polished feedback. Then they pitch capital and realize they validated the wrong assumptions. Here's what actually happens when you remove the performance: Last month, a founder came to our lab convinced their problem was real. Fifteen minutes of genuine questioning (not pitching, not selling, actually listening) and they said: "Wait. My customers aren't complaining about what I thought they were." That insight—which costs nothing but real curiosity—would've cost them 6 months and $100K if they'd built it out first. The mistake isn't moving fast. It's moving confidently on assumptions you never pressure-tested. Most validation frameworks are built for investors, not for you. They're optimized for narrative. You need something optimized for truth. What assumption in your work are you most confident about? That's probably the one worth testing first.

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Since we led Enzo Health's seed round, they've grown revenue by 40X and now serve home health agencies representing more than 500,000 patients. Today they announced their $26M fundraise, including their $6M seed from Gradient and $20M Series A from N47. We couldn't be prouder of Zach Newman, Dan Conger, Travis Elnicky and team for building the leading AI platform for home health. Just getting started!

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Maybe you didnt catch that- for every 10,000 employees that is $3-5M in GUARANTEED cost savings. 60-80% cheaper per scan than traditional health networks, just for those of you guys in the back. Join us for this weeks episode of the Digital Health Heavyweights Podcast with Elan Adler 🩻 the founder and CEO of OneImaging. Learn about their mission, integration, how they impact patients and employers! Stick around to hear how our team at MVP Growth Partners partnered up with them, and more! Watch Here: https://lnkd.in/d5AnVx8n Listen here: https://lnkd.in/ga_TNNnZ

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Not just a wearable it's a signal of where healthcare is heading. A future of health being continuously monitored, real-time preventative guidance, and data‑led. This milestone marks a broader shift from reactive care to always‑on insight. Platforms like this are redefining how we think about health, performance, and longevity https://lnkd.in/eJjvFfvi

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