Years ago, when entrepreneur Jon Medved was interested in backing various health tech startups, he had no idea that one day he would need them to improve his own quality of life.
Israel’s startup community was dealt a blow in October when Medved, one of its most high-profile VCs, announced she was retiring effective immediately. He was forced to resign from the company he founded, OurCrowd, after being diagnosed with the debilitating disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
“This came rather suddenly,” he told TechCrunch in an audibly hoarse voice — a symptom of ALS — about what could be his last interview.
“I’ve felt a bit weird in the past and they didn’t know what was wrong with me,” she explained. “I was in hospital for several weeks recovering and that’s when they tested me and said, ‘You have ALS’, which is a horrible disease, the worst you can imagine.”
ALS is a condition that degrades the brain’s motor neurons, leading to loss of muscle control, thereby impairing walking, talking, eating and breathing. He did not have the classic symptoms, as his voice was attacked first and not his limbs, he said. But he knows it will get worse, and there is no cure, only treatments.
Medved is considered one of the fathers of Israel’s startup ecosystem — often referred to as “Startup Nation” decades later best selling book namesake. He helped start it after moving from California to Israel in his 20s, then founded and sold several tech companies before turning to investing.
In 2013 he founded OurCrowd. While Israel has many strong domestic VC firmsas well as branches of global firms such as Bessemer, OurCrowd essentially invented crowdsourced venture capital, where a limited partnership was open to anyone accredited investor.
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The firm’s roster has attracted LPs from Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North America, developing a network of 240,000 accredited investor LPs in 195 countries, the firm says. Many of them are doctors, lawyers, and ordinary people who not only help their investment firms, but would otherwise be cut off from the wealth generation that VCs experience.
OurCrowd has backed names like Anthropic, Beyond Meat and Lemonade.
Medved describes OurCrowd as now a “major player” backing about 500 portfolio companies with about 74 exits, including one a few weeks ago when infrastructure planning startup Locusview sold for $525 million to Itron.
Despite Israel’s conflict with Gaza, which has affected its citizens and put the nation in the global spotlight for the Palestinian humanitarian crisis, its startup ecosystem has remained strong.
As a “startup nation,” Israel remains a key player cyber security and defense technology as well as AI, microchips, enterprise software, food tech, health tech — the whole tech stack. For example, in November, “$800 million was invested in the Israeli business ecosystem in one week,” Medved said. The country now has nearly 100 unicorns, and over the course of the year, he estimates that between $15 billion and $16 billion were invested in the country in business deals.
Now technology from some of these startups will help him navigate life with an incurable condition.
For example, he created an avatar for himself that retains his voice, face and mannerisms. (Realistic digital photo/video twin shown and full video you can see here.) OurCrowd AI holding company D-ID, an agent and avatar maker, has partnered with voice AI startup ElevenLabs and other companies through its ALS-focused Scott-Morgan Foundation to create an avatar system designed for people with ALS.
He just experienced this technology during a Zoom call with another person with ALS who was using an avatar to communicate.
“So this thing has become very, very personal for me,” Medved said. “It will keep my voice when it goes.”
But he said there will be a variety of technology startups it will rely on.
“We’ve made 60, 70 investments in healthcare in good companies that are helping people. We have a company called OncoHost, which uses artificial intelligence to help you choose what kind of immunotherapy is really going to work for you… We have companies that do next-generation sequencing for the genome. We have companies that do chronic conditions management,” he says.
“I’m telling you now as a once healthy person [who took health for granted] “I felt human pain and disease, but once you’re actually involved in one of these nasty diseases, your perspective changes,” Medved said.
All of which means that even though he’s stepped down from his position running the company and may be retiring from the spotlight, “I’m not done, okay? I want to continue to contribute, both to OurCrowd and to the overall ecosystem. So I fully intend to not retire [quietly] to this good night.”
And in the end, he says “I’m very proud that in a small way, even though we’re just investors, we’re part of this movement.”
A video of Medved’s “digital twin” shows just how realistic his avatar already is.
