Venrock

🎙Our latest episode of Running Through Walls is a special live recording from our recent AI in healthcare event where Siobhan Nolan Mangini sat down with author and @UCSF physician @Bob_Wachter for a fireside chat about his new book A Giant Leap. bit.ly/4rAljIb

AI in healthcare - revolution or evolution? On May 6, @BRobertsVC will join @AmiParekh10, @Bob_Wachter and Jonathan Chen at the @cwclub to tackle that question head-on. Find tickets and more information here: commonwealthclub.org/events/2026-05…

🎙We invest in teams we believe will drive their mission forward through any storm and @astronomerio did just that. CEO @petedejoy joined @ethanjb on Running Through Walls to talk resilience, leadership, and how their technology empowers data engineers: bit.ly/46U8eSA

🎙We’ve known how to control blood pressure for decades, yet the U.S. has barely moved the needle. @bobkocher turned to two experts – @Farzad_MD and Sunny Kishore – to break down prevention, incentives, and where AI really fits in healthcare: bit.ly/4qH693l

𝐁𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐆: 𝐌𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐀𝐈 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐩𝐬 𝐰𝐨𝐧’𝐭 𝐟𝐚𝐢𝐥 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡 𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐚𝐝. They’ll fail because they never had a moat. Let me explain. In my recent conversation with Nick Beim, one point kept resurfacing—quietly, but decisively: General intelligence is becoming cheap. Context is not. That’s the central mistake most founders (and investors) are making. They’re racing to build horizontal AI— models, copilots, wrappers, “smart” features. And wondering why differentiation evaporates. Here’s the paradox: The smarter AI gets, the less valuable intelligence alone becomes. Let that sink in. What actually compounds isn’t the model. It’s where the model lives. In workflows. In regulated environments. Inside messy, human, high-stakes decisions. That’s why vertical AI matters. Not because it’s sexier. But because it’s harder. Horizontal platforms want to win everything. But they can’t: • They don’t own the data • They don’t sit inside the workflow • They don’t have trust or relationships • And they can’t absorb infinite edge cases That friction is the moat. Here’s the reframing most people miss: Moats don’t come from intelligence. They come from context + distribution + trust. An AI that understands your business, your incentives, your constraints will outperform a “smarter” model every time. Practical takeaway for founders and investors: If your AI product can be replicated by a prompt, you don’t have a business. If your advantage disappears when the API price drops, you don’t have leverage. But if your product is embedded in decisions people can’t afford to get wrong? That’s where asymmetry lives. Thank you Patrick Ewers for the kind introduction! We’d like to thank @AlphaSenseInc for sponsoring this episode! #AI #Startups #Investing #Leadership #Founders

🎙Venrock’s @VCsurferDAD got so many questions about @INRIX's Innovation Week, he asked @BryanMi to come on Running Through Walls for a master class. Tune in to hear how INRIX architects these internal hackathons to foster true innovation. bit.ly/4aIS54B

In a special episode of Running Through Walls, CTO of the Department of Navy Justin Fanelli joins @mhitzig to unpack the results of our Beyond the Battlefield survey. bit.ly/3MfLK7y

📣In our inaugural Beyond the Battlefield defense tech survey, @NickBeim and @mhitzig have captured the sentiment of the defense community as it exists today, and created a baseline we can track over time. Check out the results here: btb2026.venrock.com

🎙On our latest episode of Running Through Walls, @bobkocher chats with Ezekiel Emanuel about his NYT bestselling new book, Eat Your Ice Cream. Tune in to get a deeper dive on six simple (and actually enjoyable!) rules for living a long and a healthy life: bit.ly/3NWr0lD

🎙In our latest Running Through Walls conversation, @mhitzig speaks with Josh Araujo and Scott Sanders of @ForterraDrive about how they rebuilt the company into a warfighter-first leader in autonomy. Tune in here: bit.ly/4a4vmQa

🎙We’re fans of things that sound too good to be true and the @Tubulis_GmbH team has done just that with their ADCs. CEO Dominik Schumacher shares more about this incredible technology with @Nimish1316 on our latest episode of Running Through Walls. bit.ly/49LMcDh

🎙️@FINNYAI's @Eden__Ovadia and @victoria_toli were on Talking Wealth today discussing their Series A round – thank you for the shoutout at 20:30! We are thrilled to be on this journey with you. youtube.com/watch?v=PEzOvX…

Congratulations to @FINNYAI on raising a $17M Series A funding round! This team is building what the future of wealth management will look like for the next decade, and we are proud to be part of the journey. bit.ly/4qe8lQ3

FINNY has raised $17M Series A led by @Venrock. We're building the organic growth engine for financial advisors - helping them find the right clients at the right time, with the right message. 400+ firms. 50x growth. Just getting started.

Excited to invest in @FINNYAI, a "shortcut to the Holy Grail" in wealth management, which has seen explosive growth since launch. Great article by @martina__elena @Forbes. @Eden__Ovadia @victoria_toli @Venrock forbes.com/sites/martinac…

While legislators are focused on whether to extend enhanced ACA subsidies and if so, how, @bobkocher co-authored a new @Health_Affairs article offering structural improvements that could stabilize the foundation and make maintaining it more affordable. bit.ly/4aWEhnC

As initiatives like ACCESS emerge, AI has the potential to reshape federal healthcare policy and @bobkocher was quoted discussing what this could look like in @washingtonpost. Read the article here: bit.ly/3XPXTlP

In a special #RunningThroughWalls conversation, our healthcare partners @BRobertsVC, @bobkocher and Siobhan Nolan Mangini delve even further into what they predict for healthcare next year. Listen here: venrock.com/podcasts/healt…

As this year comes to a close, we’re looking ahead to 2026 with our annual #healthcare predictions. We’re excited to have our newest partner Siobhan Nolan Mangini join @BRobertsVC and @bobkocher's yearly gaze into their crystal ball: fortune.com/2025/12/09/top…

AI goes into the real world 🌎 Today, we're starting a new chapter of Archetype as we celebrate our $35M Series A. The physical world generates vast amounts of sensor and video data every day but most of it goes unused. After years of AI living behind screens — in dashboards, apps, and digital abstractions — intelligence is finally stepping into the physical world. We're bringing the Archetype platform to more customers and evolving Newton from a powerful foundation model into an intelligence layer for the physical world—one that perceives, understands, and reasons across real-world systems, enabling hundreds of intelligent applications. And this is just the beginning. This funding round, led by IAG Capital Partners and Hitachi Ventures, with participation from Bezos Expeditions, Venrock, Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, Samsung, E12, Systemiq Capital, HLV, and others, enables us to scale physical intelligence globally and continue advancing Newton as the premier foundation model for the real world. Thank you to our team, partners, investors, and all of you for following our journey to making the world truly intelligent. Onwards! 🚀