Investment firm Deerfield Management is tapping into Amazon Web Services' AI and cloud technology to help AI-native healthcare and life sciences companies build and scale.
The collaboration brings together AWS’s generative AI and cloud services with the investment firm's team of AI engineers and the innovation ecosystem of the firm’s affiliate, Cure.
The firm’s Deerfield Intelligence and Deerfield Discovery and Development (3DC) teams will receive access to AI and cloud technology from AWS, as well as technical support, to scale proprietary healthcare AI products. Deerfield 3DC is the firm's internal research and development engine, while Deerfield Intelligence is the firm's data, technology and AI arm.
Select portfolio companies will get access to AWS' technical enablement and training on topics including large-scale model training, inference optimization and healthcare-specific managed services.
"This collaboration aims to drive the development of the next generation of AI-powered healthcare organizations,” said Dan Sheeran, vice president and general manager of Healthcare and Life Sciences at AWS, in a statement. "With support from AWS, interested Deerfield portfolio companies can be equipped with AI services specific to supporting healthcare and life sciences needs like Amazon Bio Discovery, as well as agentic services like Amazon Bedrock AgentCore to build AI agents and support organizations at a scale that wouldn’t have been feasible only a few years ago."
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Deerfield is working to build an ambitious AI-native platform in healthcare, according to Jim Flynn, managing partner at Deerfield. "Our Intelligence team is developing models that aim to transform how we source opportunities, evaluate science, and accelerate portfolio companies," he said.
The investment firm supports a portfolio of more than 200 private and public healthcare and life sciences investments. In May 2025, Deerfield unveiled the third installment of its healthcare innovations fund, earmarking more than $600 million for promising therapeutics and technologies.
Through the AWS partnership, Deerfield is taking steps to build AI infrastructure across its investment ecosystem. AWS will become a common technology layer that Deerfield can use internally and make available to portfolio companies, potentially helping startups move from AI development to deployment more quickly.
Ascertain, a Deerfield-backed healthcare technology company, is already using AWS infrastructure for its agentic AI platform, which automates workflows such as case management and prior authorization.
"We built Ascertain to give clinicians time back by automating the administrative burden in care, and we believe AWS’s purpose-built services for the healthcare industry will help us scale these capabilities," said Mark Michalski, M.D., chief information officer at Deerfield and CEO of Ascertain, in a statement. "We believe Deerfield’s collaboration with AWS and the AI and cloud services it makes available to Ascertain and other portfolio companies is part of a foundation with the potential to make AI-driven transformation possible at scale."
Deerfield’s headquarters at Cure, a healthcare innovation campus in New York City, sits at the center of one of the world’s densest healthcare ecosystems, home to leading academic medical centers, a growing biotech sector, and a deep network of clinicians and investors, according to the investment firm.