Spun out of Google in 2009, GV has placed big wagers on the future of healthcare and life sciences innovation. Health tech and life sciences startups now make up a third of GV’s portfolio and the venture capital firm has backed some of the more recognizable names in the space—One Medical, Flatiron Health, Grail and 23andMe.
Backed by Alphabet, GV, formerly Google Ventures, has deployed $1.3 billion into healthcare and life science companies since 2020.
As a psychiatrist and investor, Ben Robbins sees opportunities to use GV’s deep pockets and Google’s tech capabilities to tackle some of the most entrenched problems in healthcare. The VC firms focused on the intersection of technology and services.
“This is a group of people that are super interested in using the hammer of VC as a tool to improve the way care is delivered for patients and providers at a scale that I think is harder to achieve within a single institution,” Robbins said in an exclusive interview.
GV has more than $8 billion under management that it can deploy in life science, enterprise technology, consumer products and services, and frontier technology.
Robbins joined GV in 2014 and was just named its newest general partner to help ramp up the VC firm’s investments in new healthcare services and technologies. Robbins’ investments—more than 20 companies to date—have focused on healthcare delivery and neuropsychiatric therapeutics including Aspire (acquired by Anthem), Carebridge, Patina Health, Headway, Brightline, Nym, Cerevance and Waltz Health.
“The place I love to live and would love for GV to continue to live is making big bets to focus on things that are really going to change meaningfully the way that care is experienced for patients and the way they have access to it, and the way that care is experienced for providers,” he said.
Robbins has both a medical degree and an MBA from Harvard University and completed his psychiatric training at Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Hospital. Behavioral health is an area with an immense need for more investment, he noted, particularly in geriatrics, pediatrics and serious mental illness.
Only about 50% of people with a mental health diagnosis receive treatment; about 1 in 10 adults with a mental illness have no insurance coverage. Venture capital investment in virtual behavioral health startups has ramped up in the past few years.
Robbins’ direct experience as a psychiatrist provides a particularly unique vantage point, according to startup founders who work with GV. Investors at the VC firm met Robbins more than a decade ago through Ariadne Labs, a healthcare innovation center founded at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in partnership with Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health.
Turns out, Robbins’ healthcare background is not unique to the Alphabet-backed venture capital firm.
Many of the investors on GV’s life sciences team came in as physicians or scientists or both, according to Krishna Yeshwant, M.D., general partner, who himself is a physician and programmer and has been working with GV since its inception.
“[Krishna and Ben] bring that truly earnest and sincere desire to build a better healthcare system. They bring that physician ethos and spirit,” Andrew Adams, co-founder and CEO at mental health startup Headway Health, said in an interview. Headway is a GV portfolio company and banked a $70 million series B funding round last year.
“Ben introduced us to a number of psychiatrists and medical directors who have been involved with Headway. That’s a specific thing that having a psychiatrist/venture capitalist can be very helpful with. Ben and Krishna are out there forging relationships with key healthcare leaders and that’s been helpful in how we think about Headway’s development in the last few years as well as making specific introductions to the right partners at the right time,” Adams said.
Venture capitalists who are also physicians are familiar with the levers in healthcare and where the dislocations exist, said Mark Thierer, co-founder and CEO at Waltz Health, a startup that has developed a drug cost marketplace. The startup recently secured $35.4 million in series A funding led by GV.
“It’s very hard to parachute into healthcare venture capital investing unless you have some direct experience in the space,” he told Fierce Healthcare.
As part of what Thierer calls the “VC dance” that entrepreneurs take part in as they pitch their companies to secure funding, what sets some VC firms apart is often not the funding but the ecosystem and resources they can bring to the table.
“Ben’s the reason that we selected GV. He immersed himself in our space and brought the full weight of GV with him in the process,” he said. “GV also tapped talent inside Google, including product people inside Google, talent people who do the sourcing at Google as well as alliance people, as they have relationships all over the place."
With proximity to Google’s tech muscle, GV helps startups interface with the tech giant, providing unique access to its capabilities in IT, machine learning and cloud computing,
“I'm not sure if there's a fund that can go as technically deep as GV can in essentially any area across healthcare and tech and anything that blends in there,” Yeshwant said in an exclusive interview. “I think it's a combination of technical depth, having a perspective on the markets and having a long-time horizon."
Healthcare and life sciences venture investing has been a white-hot market, accelerated by the boom in virtual care and digital health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Today’s market volatility is pushing some investors to grow more cautious and funding has slowed.
But Yeshwant said GV sees big opportunities to help launch innovative companies even as the market constricts. The firm's recent healthcare bets include Mirvie, a startup predicting unexpected pregnancy complications that recently secured $60 million in funding as well as biotech company TenSixteenBio.
GV launched in 2009 during the financial crisis, he noted.
“We take the perspective that those moments are an opportunity for all sorts of reasons. One is valuations are more reasonable and attractive. And a lot of people tend to become free in those markets, and we can really get a lot of the best people into one company to start something really amazing,” he said.
Yeshwant said GV will double down on placing “big bets” on innovations in healthcare and life sciences.
“You’ll see us continue to work in areas that are of fundamental importance to health care, including looking at ways to take care of at-risk populations, geriatric, psychiatry, different approaches to bringing neuroscience and neurologic drugs to market.
“We're very interested in areas where these things intersect with things like drug pricing, things like clinical trials will kind of operate across the full spectrum. I do worry that various parts of the healthcare system as we come out of the pandemic will face strains as the emergency funding goes away. So, we're spending a lot of time thinking about where areas the hospital systems can become more efficient.”
Robbins noted that GV takes a long view on healthcare and life sciences investing and pushes back on the "growth at all costs" approach that has proven perilous to some startups.
"We want to create durable companies that can endure the complexity of the markets. We’re always going to focus on doing the right thing for the patient, first and foremost, and the clinician," he said.
Adding, "We can take a long perspective on a company’s path to getting there but we can’t tolerate when companies go off the range in trying to get to growth for the sake of growth. If you are part of a company that has fundamental value to patients, clinicians and the health system at large, it does take longer to grow properly. As a byproduct of that, we'll be part of profitable companies."