Aegis Ventures’ Blueprint for Building AI-Native Companies
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What is Aegis Ventures and its mission in healthcare?
Hello and welcome. This is The Michelle Hussein Show. I'm Michelle Hussein. I speak with people like Elon Musk.
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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.
No, that's a great summary. So maybe we'll rewind a little bit. What brought you to the point where you wanted to found this firm?
So as you mentioned in the intro, I was working at APL Group, which is a very flexible global investment firm, was focused primarily on new business creation. So I built a data center business for us in Asia and southern Japan, where we're building a gigawatt campus in Kyushu, which is the southernmost island in Japan. Was also doing a lot of early stage investing for us, where we had made a lot of investments and early stage healthcare and life sciences companies, and was seeing all the transformative improvements that there had been in healthcare AI going back eight plus years. And we started working with health systems that long ago. Northwell was our first partnership, did a number of investments together, saw a lot of synergy in that partnership.
You know, started to meet with other health systems and saw that there was a need for an innovation partner to be able to help them transform themselves, drive new margin back to the system and also solve core challenges that they're facing using technology. And, you know, pitch the founder and chairman of APL on launching a new platform, which became Aegis. And we thought the most transformative impact would be delivered by not just investing in things that already existed, but co-creating new initiatives in partnership with large incumbents that are eager to transform themselves and diversify margin and revenue. And so that was really the genesis of what became Aegis.
So what were some of the projects that you worked on in conjunction with maybe, let's just say, Northwell that you highlighted back in the day?
So back then it was just a lot of early stage minority venture investing. But I think through that experience, we saw the extent to which health systems were going to need to transform themselves to be able to meet the modern age. And I think the thing that I was most interested by was the fact that healthcare relative to other industries has had this significant productivity trap over the last couple of decades.
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