Esther and Anne Wojcicki support new healthcare accelerator, fund

A new business residency program is helping to address one of the most pressing issues in the US – health care.

Mary Minno, an investor and former product manager at Google, announced Wednesday the launch of one Early stage startup accelerator program called Treehub and called an early stage venture firm AI Health Fundwhich aims to support startups working at the intersection of healthcare and artificial intelligence. AI Health Fund is the entrepreneurial arm of Treehub Residency, where founders apply to incubate their ideas.

The residency program lasts six months — the first 12 weeks are devoted to helping the founders find product-market fit, and the last 12 weeks are focused on the direction of the company, Minno said. “It could be raising a big round, it could be joining a traditional accelerator, or maybe growing into a hospital system.”

She got the idea to start a residency and program late last year, when she was six weeks postpartum with her second child, and when a family member was diagnosed with acute leukemia, going from “very healthy to very sick almost overnight,” she said. She didn’t like how difficult it was to find a specialist for this family member, how long they had to wait to be treated after diagnosis, and how politics and outdated technology often slowed down the treatment process.

“It was only when people stepped outside of that system and broke the rules that things could happen,” he said. “I realized we need more startups here because they’re going to challenge the status quo.”

So she turned to her longtime friend Esther Wojcicki (trainer and mother of the late former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki). Esther was once Minno’s high school journalism teacher, and the two have remained close ever since. The two talked about how to increase health innovation and how academics—often the ones with a lot of research—struggle to get startup ideas.

The problem is that they don’t really know how to tell a good story, at least not in the way that venture capitalists want to hear, and they also don’t know how to commercialize their research well, Minno said. She and Esther wanted to create a program that would pair operators with academically focused founders, “much like a venture would do to teach them the art of building a business.”

In addition to starting the Treehub residency, for which founders must apply, Minno and Esther decided to work with members of the biomedical data department at Stanford to start the AI ​​Health Fund, writing early checks ($50,000 to $150,000) to companies coming from academia. The fund aims to raise $10 million and made its first close last year at $1.5 million, Minno said. They raised $500,000 from family and friends and then received a $1 million check from billionaire VC Tim Draper.

Anne Wojcicki joined as an operating partner, while Esther serves as a founding advisor. The Stanford team includes Roxana Daneshjou, assistant professor of biomedical data science and dermatology at Stanford Medicine. Minno’s father, Derek, who is chairman of VC firm Point Capital. and Alexandros Ioannidis, assistant professor of biomedical data science and genetics at Stanford.

The AI ​​Health Fund hopes to support at least 60 companies in this first iteration of the program. The fund was created as a separate vehicle because Minno also wanted to support founders who may not make it through the program, or who may be second- or third-time founders without needing the Treehub program, but who still have a good idea.

That said, the AI ​​Fund has already backed 12 companies from the Treehub program, including women’s hormone monitoring Clair Health (which also went through the a16z speedrun) and researcher Dennis Walls’ new company focused on childhood autism.

Minno said the residency is still in its experimental phase as the team works out how best to navigate the accelerator-fund approach. He said the real value of the residency program is that he hopes to work with early-stage founders, before there’s even a company.

“In more than half of the cases, we introduce the founders to the lawyers who helped them incorporate, so we’re almost playing a co-founder role,” he said.

“The difference between us and the other accelerators out there is that we really help them develop a strategy and get it right; when there’s a problem, we help them with problem-solving skills,” Esther said.

Minno said the residency program Treehub wants to create to support founders’ needs, such as setting up meetings they might need or anything else needed to help them scale their businesses. “We don’t have a demo day because these companies mature at different rates,” he said.

The goal, overall, is to see how the first iteration of the residency program goes, to “figure out what aspects of it can be scaled up and what aspects need to stay small,” Minno continued.

“It’s very important to us to make every company we work with successful,” he continued. “Our vision is to do it 10 times, so we’re starting with something really small and then our plan is, after we do this cycle a few times, we hope to do it across the country.”