Advertise on podcast: Pear Healthcare Playbook

Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Today we’re thrilled to host Wyatt McDonnell, co-founder and CEO of Infinimmune. Founded in 2022, Infinimmune is taking a new approach to antibody drug discovery by using the human immune system as a guide. Their thesis is that some of the best therapeutic antibodies may already exist within people and the company combines large-scale single-cell sequencing of human B cell repertoires with its proprietary discovery platform and antibody language models to identify and engineer human-derived therapeutics. Infinimmune has built an internal pipeline across inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, announced an $838 million multi-target antibody discovery collaboration with Merck, and raised a $75 million Series A as of August 2026. In this conversation, Wyatt explains how Infinimmune finds promising antibodies in the human immune repertoire and engineers them for therapeutic development. He also explains what it takes to build a durable therapeutics company around a discovery platform.

Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Every week, we'll be getting to know trailblazing healthcare leaders and diving into building a digital health and biotech business from 0 to 1. We would greatly appreciate it if you took a moment to listen to the episode on either Apple or Spotify and leave us a rating! Your support helps our guests' insights reach a larger audience! Today we're thrilled to share our interview with Vikas Sabnani, Co-founder and CEO of Marit Health, a free, AI-powered career community platform built for physicians and advanced practice providers. Clinicians share their own compensation data and in exchange get access to tens of thousands of real peer-reported salaries across every specialty and state, including the details that actually matter like base pay, bonuses, call schedules, hours worked, PTO, and benefits. Think of it as a Glassdoor for medicine. Marit also runs an AI powered jobs platform that matches clinicians to roles based on their specific preferences. In just fifteen months since launching, more than 100,000 clinicians have joined, making Marit one of the fastest growing community platforms in medicine [1]. Before Marit, Vikas spent seven years at Glassdoor and then joined Transcarent as head of product. In this conversation, Vikas walks through his path from Glassdoor to healthcare, how Marit's co-founder started the company on a Google Sheet, the anonymization architecture that protects physicians in small specialties, and how the platform is turning transparency into a business.

Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Every week, we'll be getting to know trailblazing healthcare leaders and diving into building a digital health and biotech business from 0 to 1. We would greatly appreciate it if you took a moment to listen to the episode on either Apple or Spotify and leave us a rating! Your support helps our guests' insights reach a larger audience! Today we're thrilled to share our interview with Arpan Parikh, MD and Amit Parikh, MD, and Kyle Alwyn, the co-founders of Kin Health, a free app that records patients' doctor visits, turns them into a plain-English summary with next steps, and helps them act on what they were told. Kin closed a $9 million seed round with GoodRx co-founders Doug Hirsch and Trevor Bezdek joining as founding partners and executive chairmen.1 In this conversation, Arpan, Amit, and Kyle walk through the personal and professional catalysts behind Kin, how the company is borrowing (and adapting) the GoodRx playbook, how Kin complies with security and privacy, and how they think about consent in a world where both doctor and patient are now showing up to the visit with their own AI listening in.

Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Today we’re thrilled to host Sahir Jaggi, founder and CEO of Forus, formerly known as Tandem. Forus is building the infrastructure layer for medication access, helping providers navigate the complex journey from prescription to treatment. The company recently announced that it has raised more than $160 million and now supports thousands of practices across all 50 states. In this episode, we discuss Sahir’s journey from Oscar Health to founding Forus, why medication access remains so broken, and how Forus grew from individual clinics into a nationwide provider network.

Today we're thrilled to host David Lortscher, MD, co-founder and board chair of Curology, the personalized prescription skincare company he built out of a telehealth experiment in 2014. Curology has since grown into a business that has served more than 5 million patients. After a decade as CEO, David stepped back into the board chair role in 2022 and has since written Why Doctors Win: The Doctor's Guide to Creating or Joining a High-Impact Startup, based on exclusive interviews with physician founders of ten category-leading healthcare companies. In this conversation, David walks through how he first started the company, raising investor money as a physician, how he built a compounding pharmacy, growing to a 50-state clinician network, and discusses his new book!

Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Every week, we'll be getting to know trailblazing healthcare leaders and diving into building a digital health and biotech business from 0 to 1. Today we're thrilled to host Mark Cuban, co-founder of the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company. Cost Plus launched in 2022 with a simple promise: sell generic drugs at the actual cost plus a transparent 15% markup, no hidden fees, no middlemen. In this conversation, Mark walks through how a cold email turned into a company that's now taking on the entire pharmacy benefit infrastructure of the country, from generics to manufacturing to direct provider contracting.

Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Today we’re thrilled to host Ron Alfa, co-founder and CEO of Noetik. Noetik is building an AI-native platform for cancer biology, generating large-scale human data to train biological foundation models that both predict patient responses to therapy and uncover new drug targets and treatment opportunities. Most recently, Noetik signed a $50 million licensing agreement with GSK, giving GSK access to Noetik’s virtual cell foundation models, along with one of the largest multimodal spatial oncology datasets assembled to date.  In this episode, we discuss Ron’s journey to founding Noetik, why building truly useful models of biology requires large-scale, multimodal human data, and how biological foundation models can transform precision oncology. We also explore what it takes to build an AI-native biotech company, lessons from partnering with pharma, the future of drug discovery, and the path toward bringing more personalized cancer treatment to every patient.

Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Every week, we’ll be getting to know trailblazing healthcare leaders and diving into building a digital health and biotech business from 0 to 1. We would greatly appreciate it if you took a moment to listen to the episode on either Apple or Spotify and leave us a rating! Your support helps our guests' insights reach a larger audience! Today we're thrilled to host Anirudh Joshi, co-founder of Valar Labs, who is building the company with co-founder Viswesh Krishna. Valar is pioneering AI-native oncology diagnostics using standard pathology slides to predict treatment response, starting with bladder cancer and expanding across oncology. The company raised a $22M Series A co-led by DCVC and Andreessen Horowitz, with continued backing from Pear VC since day one. In this conversation, Anirudh walks through how the genesis of the company, why pathology has long been underutilized and what it took to bring Vesta, its genitourinary-focused portfolio of AI powered pathology tests, to the clinic.

Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Today we’re excited to sit down with Jeffery Liu, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Assort Health, a company building specialty-specific AI voice agents to fix the front door of healthcare. Assort is reimagining patient access by reducing hold times, improving scheduling, and helping patients get to the right care faster. In this episode, we explore how Assort got started, why patient access has remained such a stubborn problem in healthcare, and what the team learned from shipping its earliest real-world deployments. We dive into why specialty-specific workflows matter, how Assort thinks about encoding the complexity of scheduling and triage, and what it takes to turn highly customized implementations into a scalable platform. We also discuss the company’s broader vision for AI-powered patient navigation across voice, text, and other channels.

Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Today we're thrilled to sit down with Othman Laraki, Co-founder and CEO of Color Health, a company reinventing cancer care through a virtual-first, end-to-end model. Othman has spent his career at the intersection of technology and healthcare—from helping build Chrome at Google to leading product at Twitter to founding Color, where he now focuses on expanding access to high-quality cancer prevention, screening, and treatment. In this episode, we explore how Color got started, what the team learned transitioning from genomics into full-stack care delivery, and why reducing friction across the care pathway is critical for improving outcomes. We dive into how Color’s model works across the entire cancer journey, how the company thinks about system-level change and distribution, and how AI—through collaborations with OpenAI and Google Cloud—is powering new capabilities for patients and clinicians.

Today we're thrilled to get to know Travis Zack, Chief Medical Officer of OpenEvidence. OpenEvidence is the world's leading medical information platform and the fastest growing applications for physicians in history. Over 40% of US clinicians leverage OpenEvidence for evidence based practice support that is directly embedded into their workflows. Through an array of strategic content partnerships (including the American Medical Association, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and all eleven JAMA specialty journals—such as JAMA Oncology and JAMA Neurology) OpenEvidence gives clinicians the power to search once, skip the scavenger hunt, and surface the science in seconds. Most recently, OpenEvidence has raised $200M in its Series C from Top Investors like Sequoia, GV Thrive, Kleiner Perkins and others! In this episode, we discuss how OpenEvidence is transforming access to medical evidence, the company’s rapid growth and adoption by clinicians, its business model and journal partnerships, and the future roadmap for AI-powered clinical decision support.

Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Every week, we’ll be getting to know trailblazing healthcare leaders and diving into building a digital health business from 0 to 1. We would greatly appreciate if you took a moment to listen to the episode on either Apple or Spotify and leave us a rating! Your support helps our guests' insights reach a larger audience! Today we're grateful to get to know Amar Kendale,  Co-founder and President of Homeward, a company reinventing how care is delivered in rural America. Amar has spent the last 20 years building healthcare products that make life better for patients, providers, and health plans. At Homeward he is focused on improving access to care in rural communities. Before that, he helped grow Livongo from an early-stage startup to its $18B acquisition by Teladoc, where he became Chief Product Officer. In this episode, we’re diving into how Homeward started, the challenges in building in rural health, how Homeward operates and gets paid, and how the company hopes to scale and navigate the upcoming year.

Today, we’re excited to get to know Adam Stansell, CEO and Founder of Axle Health, the operating system for Home Health. Before founding Axle, Adam spearheaded the launch of new markets at UberEats and built a high-growth business line at Motive, a leader in fleet logistics. With deep expertise at the intersection of operations, technology, and scale, he’s now bringing world class logistics to one of healthcare’s most overlooked frontiers: home health. Founded in 2020, Axle is tackling the $150B+ home health industry in the US growing at 9% every year, of which most of home health still runs on old legacy software or spreadsheets. Recently announced, Axle has raised $10M in Series A led by Carl Byers and Julia McDowell at F-Prime Capital, joined by Lightbank and previous investors YC and us at Pear VC! We at Pear, especially my GP Mar Hershenson and I have been super grateful to be part of his journey.

We're excited to introduce Chris Ellis, CEO of Thatch. With a background in cancer research and clinical software, Chris brings a unique blend of scientific rigor and product vision to one of the most complex challenges in the United States: healthcare. Under his leadership, Thatch has scaled quickly, now serving over a thousand companies and helping employees navigate their health coverage through a modern, fintech-powered experience.

Today, we’re excited to feature Michelle Davey, CEO of Wheel. Wheel is redefining virtual care by connecting clinicians to telehealth opportunities and equipping healthcare organizations with scalable, tech-enabled solutions. Under Michelle’s leadership, the company has become a leading platform expanding access to care nationwide. Before Wheel, Michelle brought together experience from Google, Favor Delivery, and Medtronic—insight that now helps shape her vision for the future of care delivery. In this episode, we dive into how Wheel is powering virtual care infrastructure for enterprise healthcare, the strategic thinking behind acquiring GoodRx’s virtual care platform, how Michelle sees the future of telehealth evolving across consumer and pharma markets, and what founders should consider when navigating M&A in digital health.