Vanguards of Health Care by Bloomberg Intelligence
Aegis Ventures’ Blueprint for Building AI-Native Companies
04 Dec 2025
“AI agents are at the knee of the curve in terms of where things are headed,” says John Beadle, Aegis Ventures co-founder and managing partner. In this episode of the Vanguards of Health Care podcast, Beadle joins Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Jonathan Palmer to unpack Aegis’s thesis-driven approach to founding AI-native health-care companies. He details how its 14-system consortium sources problems directly from operators, why automation is the biggest near-term value driver and how ventures like Ascertain have emerged from that model. Beadle also discusses the evolving venture market, the rise of agentic AI and why his personal experiences, shaped by his mother’s medical journey, fuel his mission to make the system more accessible and equitable.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is Aegis Ventures and its mission in healthcare?
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You certainly ask interesting questions. Welcome to another episode of Bloomberg Intelligence's Vanguards of Healthcare podcast, where we speak with the leaders at the forefront of change in the healthcare industry. My name is Jonathan Palmer, and I'm a healthcare analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, the in-house research arm of Bloomberg.
We're very excited to have Jon Beda with us today in the studio. Jon is the co-founder and managing partner of Aegis Ventures, which was started in 2021 with a focus on digital health and AI. Prior to starting Aegis, he spent half a decade at APL Group, a private investment firm.
While Aegis is relatively new to the venture scene, it's partnered with a number of leading health care systems like Northwell, UPMC, and Ochsner, among others, through its digital consortium. Welcome to the podcast, John. Thanks for having me, Jonathan. Great to be here. Why don't we set the stage for the 30,000-foot view? Where does Aegis sit in the venture community?
So Aegis is a venture studio.
So we co-found new companies from the ground up in partnership with large health systems, as you highlighted, Jonathan. Within that mandate, we have a lot of flexibility in terms of how we can build new things. So we can start from the ground up. We'll build around teams of investigators. We can do carve outs or spin outs of business units, and then we can do M&A that we can build on top of.
But the ethos is really we want to use transformative new technologies to be able to co-create something that is brand new and novel and that solves a major pain point in the overall ecosystem.
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Chapter 2: How does Aegis Ventures co-create companies with health systems?
It's a great question. So our process really revolves around we will spend time with all of the management teams that are health system partners. So we now have 14 health systems that we have strategic collaboration agreements with. They represent a really nice microcosm of the US health care system as a whole. And so we have large AMCs like Stanford, Yale, Vanderbilt, et cetera.
You know, huge conglomerates like a Northwell or a UPMC that have a little bit of everything. You know, public land grant universities like an IU or an Ohio State, et cetera. And it really differs at every place how we go about it, just depending on how they organize themselves and how they like to go about those types of needs-finding analyses.
But to generalize across all of them, we will spend a lot of time with the C-suites. They will tell us what their strategic plans are, where they're deploying technology, what's working, what's not, and where there's places where new companies could fill in gaps.
At Northwell, we heard directly from the COO of the health system that they were having a huge challenge with this particular set of workflows.
And from there, we ended up spending a lot of time shadowing the teams that were doing that set of workflows, thought about how could we build a technology that could really turbocharge their productivity and enable us to drive ROI and impact for the health system. And then it comes down to, can you recruit the right leadership team? Is the technology going to work as effectively as we want it to?
is there a broader market need for this?
And so once we find that there's a need within a particular health system that brought us the challenge, we also want to triangulate that with the rest of our consortium to make sure that we're not building a solution that is overly bespoke to one health system, given that we want to build scaled venture-backed businesses that can succeed in the market independently.
And so we have a pretty structured process from going from hearing a problem prototyping a solution, testing that in the market broadly, recruiting the team and standing that up, and then launching the company. And it's different depending on each time that we do it, but I think we've created a blueprint or a playbook that is relatively systematic across the board.
No, it's interesting because now I guess my follow up question here is like, so where it sounds like a certain past that initial playbook. Right. So where where are they in their life cycle? And maybe within the consortium, have they expanded into a number of the other members?
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Chapter 3: What role does AI play in healthcare transformation?
and folks that have government insurance, where they typically will either just barely break even or lose a lot of money.
And so now that you have Amazon, payers, lots of private equity sponsored type new entrants coming into the market to target those patients, I think health systems are really eager to think through how do we create a consumer experience that is similar to how other industries are able to treat their customers as consumers, not just as patients. And so
I think there's a lot more comfort now that we've seen where impact is really driven, where there's risks, how you mitigate against hallucinations and areas where you could create a lot of problems if you're not able to safely deploy the technology. And so I think there's more openness than ever to how do we actually leverage these technologies to improve patient care much more directly.
It's interesting, as you're talking about, I was just thinking about the landscape and we've had a number of companies, you know, tackling, I would say, different niches of that workflow problem, you know, whether it's payment integrity, whether it's prior auth, you know, RCM, etc., Where do you think this is going to pan out?
And I guess I ask that because I see the legacy providers from the 70s and 80s. They're still around. There's newer companies that have a lot of share. There's big private equity-backed companies in the space. A lot of them are New Mountain. And then Epic is doing tons of stuff and talk about their data lake and all that sort of thing. So
I guess, are we going to see a consolidation of all these different solutions under a couple larger flags, if you will?
I think one of the questions we spend probably more time discussing than any other is where is there a right to win for different constituencies? That's a much better way to say it than I just did. No, no. And so I think you hit on that in the question. So I think it really comes down to what particular challenge is being solved.
Because ultimately, when you look at, you know, what do incumbents have versus what do startups have from a starting from the perspective of just, you know, starting out? Incumbents have trust. They have access to customers. They have capital. They have all these advantages over startups. And startups are able to develop new AI-native tech stacks. They can move a lot more quickly.
They have less inertia, et cetera. And so our perspective is... Where there's places that incumbents are able to form partnerships with startups or are able to acquire startups or build new business units internally that can enable them to behave in a much more agile fashion like startups can, those are places where they're probably going to win over startups.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of Ascertain in Aegis's portfolio?
And so we've now built this really interesting set of technology companies that I think can do a lot of that digital transformation. I think we are going to look to lean into some of the services, you know, heavy companies, which today may be 30 percent gross margin, but with AI could be 60 to 70 percent and could be a lot more scalable in the way they approach the market.
So I think it's going to be a hybrid approach for us of building more technology and also leaning into legacy companies where we think that we can bring an entirely different approach that's much more tech enabled. And ultimately, what that all comes down to is, can we serve as Aegis as a really effective scaled partner to large health systems, to life sciences, to payers?
And I think as I look at us expanding the number of partners that we have, we're spending a lot more time with the life sciences community.
And I think there's a really interesting nexus between, you know, providers and pharma around how do you better leverage, you know, clinical trials, you know, data assets, you know, all the different things that sit at that nexus to be able to get drugs to patients a lot more effectively, run trials more efficiently, etc.
And so I think for us leaning into places where there's friction at an interface ecosystem and then thinking through how do we build new technologies and new solutions that can make that exchange a lot more frictionless. So for us, we're engaging more broadly in the ecosystem as well.
So one last question here before we maybe wrap it up, maybe one technical question and one personal question. But if you look at the technology roadmap coming in the next couple of years, what are you most excited about?
There's so many things. And so if I were to highlight one thing, I think it is starting to see large scale impact of AI agents. I think we're very, very early days of seeing AI agents as a technology deployed. But I think as you look at health systems in particular, there is such a massive need across both the back office and the front office.
And I think we are only in the very, very early days of seeing that technology deployed at scale. And we've been fortunate over the last few years to be some of the earliest deployers of the tech.
But I think as it has now demonstrated trust and efficacy in ROI, I think you're going to see health systems and other players start to really lean into those technologies, which I think has huge potential to improve access, efficiency, make health systems more financially sustainable, which is going to be incredibly important.
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