From Hype to Health: AI’s Great Re-Wiring of Healthcare

AI Is Eating the Industry — from Infrastructure to Science

AI isn’t a feature anymore; it’s the foundation. At HLTH 2025, the conversation had moved beyond “What can AI do?” to “Where can it deliver measurable value?” From documentation and utilization management to discovery and diagnosis, AI is now embedded across the care stack.

Companies like Abridge, Suki, Ambience Healthcare, and Open Evidence made their presence felt — each showing how GenAI and large-language models can safely and efficiently assist clinicians in real-world workflows. The energy around these players signaled something important: AI in healthcare isn’t theoretical anymore; it’s infrastructural.

At Alumni Ventures, we’re backing the broader foundation that also enables this shift. Hello Patient is reimagining the “front door” of healthcare — using conversational AI to automate calls, scheduling, and intake for clinics strained by labor shortages. Anomaly applies AI to simplify reimbursement and facilitate payment certainty across a complex healthcare value chain. Lila Science is pioneering scientific superintelligence to accelerate drug discovery and precision biology.

AI isn’t replacing healthcare — it’s rewiring it, from the administrative rails to the scientific frontier

Different Stakeholders, Different Incentives

HLTH 2025 underscored a timeless truth: every player in healthcare wants AI, but for different reasons. Providers want workflow relief. Payers want lower costs. Pharma wants faster trials. Consumers want empowerment.

But incentives aren’t aligned — and in healthcare, incentives drive everything.

A technology only scales when it solves a problem someone is paid to fix.

That’s why AV invests where incentives and innovation converge. Companies like Belong Health and Nest Health are building value-based, risk-bearing care models that align payers, providers, and patients. Hopscotch Health takes that same ethos to rural communities, combining technology with human-centered primary care. And SonderMind brings data-driven infrastructure to behavioral health, helping networks transition to outcomes-based reimbursement.

Even amid AI’s rise, we continue to focus on value-based care models — because aligning cost, quality, and access remains one of the most powerful and investable shifts in all of healthcare.

Adoption Isn’t a Given — And Value Isn’t Automatic

At HLTH, investors were quick to say it: “Every booth sounds the same — AI-powered, patient-centric, scalable.” But true value depends on execution and adoption.

We’ve seen this before — when “digital health” promised transformation but got stuck at pilot scale. The winners this time will be those with real data moats, aligned incentives, and operational discipline. Judi Health (formerly Capital Rx) is one example: a full-stack platform redefining health and pharmacy benefits management through data and automation.

AI will touch every corner of healthcare, but only a few companies will get paid for it.

Can AI Solve It? Sure. Will It Be Allowed To? That’s the Question.

As innovation accelerates, regulation and governance loom large. The smartest founders aren’t ignoring that — they’re designing for it.

Healthcare is permissioned. To scale, companies need trust as much as tech. Ellipsis Health, another AV portfolio company, is proving this with clinically validated voice biomarkers for mental health — marrying cutting-edge AI with clinical evidence and responsible data practices.

The takeaway: permission and performance must evolve together. The companies that win will be the ones regulators, clinicians, and patients can trust.

Valuations Are Sky-High — But the Real Opportunities Are Just Opening

Even with tighter capital markets, valuations in AI healthtech have surged. According to recent HLTH coverage, health-AI startups captured nearly two-thirds of venture dollars in 2025. Yet not all dollars are equal. The gap between hype and defensibility is widening.

For retail investors, that creates a rare moment: the chance to participate early in high-growth healthcare innovation — without taking on single-company risk. That’s exactly what the Alumni Ventures HealthTech Fund and HealthTech Syndicate are built to do.

We co-invest alongside leading funds like NEA, 8VC, General Catalyst, and more — curating diversified exposure to the very companies shaping this transformation.

Empowered or Overwhelmed? The Consumer Conundrum

We now have access to unprecedented personal data — genetic markers, wearables, continuous biometrics. But more information doesn’t automatically mean better health.

As one HLTH speaker put it, “Knowing your genome is great. Acting on it is better.”

Platforms like Function Health and Ōura are helping bridge that gap — turning insight into action. Function Health offers members a continuous view of their personalized, biomarker data and personalized recommendations for prevention, while Ōura’s ring sensors track sleep, recovery, and readiness, turning wearables into everyday health coaching tools.

The consumer revolution is real, but the winners will be those that turn knowledge into next steps, not just dashboards.

Will the LLM See You Now?

Large-language models (LLMs) are quietly becoming the new healthcare infrastructure — summarizing patient encounters, automating utilization management, coding, and billing.

This is where adoption is fastest: ambient documentation, prior-auth automation, clinical summarization. It’s not glamorous, but it’s transformative. AI won’t just treat healthcare — it will run it.

Why This Matters for Investors

Healthcare remains America’s largest and most complex market — $4.9 trillion and growing. Its problems are structural, not cyclical. That means the solutions being built now — AI-powered infrastructure, full-stack care models, precision science — aren’t short-term investments. They’re decade-long opportunities.

For individual investors, these markets were once out of reach. Now, through the Alumni Ventures HealthTech Fund and our HealthTech Syndicate, you can invest alongside institutional capital in the very companies defining the future of healthcare.

We focus on three pillars:

This is healthcare’s AI moment — and we’re helping investors participate intelligently.

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The hype cycle is ending. The health cycle is beginning.

If you want to invest in the companies turning AI’s promise into measurable health outcomes, now’s the time to act.

👉 Learn more or invest today at av.vc/funds/healthtech

Join us as we back the founders transforming American healthcare — from infrastructure to science. Because the future of AI isn’t just intelligence — it’s health.

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