May 2026.
May was the month it all landed.
In February I told you the flywheel was spinning. In May, it ripped.
2,000 report downloads in one week. 380 people across four cities. Two new portfolio companies. An SPV launching into our first investment. A brand new look top to bottom. And Fund I closes in a few days.
This is what three years of compound work looks like when it finally lands in the same month. The flywheel isn't a metaphor anymore. It's a P&L.
The State of AI Healthcare 2026 went viral.
On March 17, I posted on LinkedIn that I'd spent three years reviewing 500+ AI healthcare startups and was putting the data into one place. The post went viral. Two weeks later, the report dropped. 2,000 people downloaded it in the first week.
This isn't a McKinsey deck or a PitchBook download. It's what the earliest-stage AI healthcare pipeline actually looks like, from the seat of someone reading every deck, talking to every founder, and writing the checks.
It's the most comprehensive proprietary dataset on early-stage AI healthcare in the country. Nobody else is seeing the market from this angle at this volume.
380 people. 4 cities. 3 weeks.
We just wrapped the State of AI x Healthcare roadshow. Massive lift. Juice was absolutely worth the squeeze.
Same mission in every room. Make healthcare better with the technology we have right now.
Different energy in every city:
Buttoned up. Investor-oriented. Capital flow was the question on everyone's mind.
Laid back. Founder-forward. The conversation was about building, not allocating.
Tight-knit Florida crew. Shared resentment for a broken system. An even bigger passion to fix it.
Cameras off, but the chat made it loud and clear. People want in.
Healthcare's problems don't care about geography. Neither does the will to solve them.
To everyone who showed up: thank you. You made this real. More soon.
Healthcare is broken in a hundred ways. Which one frustrates you the most?
Two new investments. One SPV.
The portfolio is now five companies deep. Here's what we just closed.
Directed Systems is a Cambridge-headquartered healthtech company building an FDA-cleared AI clinical copilot for cardiovascular instability in the OR and ICU. Their flagship product, DS Aware, plugs into existing hospital patient monitors and converts the data stream into real-time visual guidance and cloud analytics. No new hardware. No disposables.
Roughly 30% of surgical and ICU patients experience sudden, preventable cardiovascular instability events. That's 6 million US patients a year and an estimated $45 billion in avoidable costs. Legacy systems from GE, Philips, and Edwards display numbers and trigger threshold-based alarms, but tell clinicians nothing about what to do next. That action gap is what kills people. Directed Systems closes it.
They're already in paid clinical use at Ascension Dell Seton in Austin (450+ paid cases) with a system-level pilot at Hackensack Meridian Health in New Jersey. Their Gen 2 product, DS Pilot, targets FDA filing in Q2 2027, moving from passive guidance to directive, patient-specific treatment recommendations.
The team includes CEO Mark Leaning (serial healthtech entrepreneur with multiple exits), a US commercial lead from Medtronic (16 business units, over $1B in annual sales), and Prof. Maurizio Cecconi (Past President of the European Society of Intensive Care) as senior medical advisor.
Why we wrote the check: FDA-cleared product, real US revenue, a credible enterprise wedge, and a team that has done this before.
Stanford spinout, incubated at SRI International. MDC is building ReachMR, the first MRI-compatible robotic system that lets physicians intervene inside the MRI bore in real time.
Today, MRI-guided biopsies require a stepwise workflow where patients are repeatedly moved in and out of the scanner between scans. The result: a 25% diagnostic error rate on sub-centimeter lesions, more than 40,000 preventable deaths annually from missed or delayed diagnoses, and an estimated $200 billion in avoidable costs.
ReachMR uses custom hydraulic actuators that transmit motion and force into the MRI bore without electronics, enabling sub-millimeter precision and haptic feedback. Animal studies show 3x smaller lesion targeting, 2x reduction in procedure duration, and 2x throughput uplift. Six patent filings sit on the core hydraulic actuator architecture.
The team is led by Sam Frishman (Stanford PhD, foundational tech from Mark Cutkosky's lab) with Evelyn Mendoza (Northeastern PhD, world expert in hydrostatic transmissions and haptics). The advisory bench is exceptional for a pre-seed company: John Freund MD (co-founder of Intuitive Surgical), Bruce Daniel MD (Stanford radiology, pioneer in interventional MRI), and Chris Jones (UCSF/Stanford Device Consortium) on regulatory.
Co-investors include SOSV, SRI International, WERU, Pareto Holdings, ABV, Gaingels, Element i4 Capital, HAX, Capital Factory, Reinforced Ventures, and MedTech Innovator.
Why we wrote the check: A genuine deep tech moat (the hydraulic actuator IP is something competitors haven't solved), a top-1% advisory bench, and a strategic exit path validated by Mazor / Medtronic ($1.64B), Auris / J&J ($3.4B), Mako / Stryker ($1.68B), and Corindus / Siemens ($1.1B).
Our first investment ever. AGED is building a $195 noninvasive blood test for MASH (formerly NASH), a fatty liver disease affecting 25 million Americans, 97% of whom don't know they have it. The current gold standard diagnostic is a $4,000+ liver biopsy with 70 to 80% screen-fail rates in clinical trials.
They're mid-trial across Walter Reed and 8 additional US sites. Interim readout on the first 100 patients: greater than 95% diagnostic efficiency. They've raised approximately $5M to date and have already closed $475K of a $1M extension.
We're extending our position via SPV, and it closes the same day as Fund I on May 25. If you want to participate, reach out.
A few days left.
After 13 months of fundraising, Fund I closes on Sunday, May 25, 2026. If you're an accredited investor and you want in, the door is open until then.
If you have questions or want to talk through it, reach out to me directly.
The room is the moat.
Every month, the top 4 companies from a pipeline of nearly 700 pitch directly to our LPs. The committee grades them on team, market, product, and overall interest using a structured rubric. Their feedback directly shapes which companies we back.
The people in that room are the moat. Physician-scientists. Biotech and medtech CEOs. Professors of AI. Fortune 100 consultants. PhD researchers. Operators who have built and sold companies. They show up, they ask the hard questions, and they actually move the needle on our decisions.
This isn't a passive LP base. It's a working group.
Interested in joining this community? The Executive LP Committee is reserved for investors in Intelligence Ventures. Reach out to learn more.
696 companies and counting.
Since the February update, another 155 AI healthcare startups have applied to Intelligence Ventures. We're now sitting at 696 total applications across our four verticals: Biotech and Pharma Tools, Diagnostics, Medical Devices, and Healthcare SaaS.
Still averaging roughly 25 to 30 new applications per week. The proprietary dataset behind the State of AI Healthcare Report keeps compounding, and so does the moat.
Our consulting arm is live.
IV Advisory is the consulting arm of Intelligence Ventures. We work with healthcare and life sciences companies on go-to-market strategy, capital raise advisory, executive positioning, and investor relations. Three clients on retainer today. Bench is open for two more.
If you're a founder or CEO building something ambitious in healthcare and you need strategic support from a team that understands both the science and the business, reach out.
One thing to be very clear about: this is for paid engagements, not employment. Please do not email asking for a job. The team is full.
We built our own brand with AI.
I built an AI agent and told it to be a $500/hr brand strategist.
Then I built another and told it to be a $200/hr web designer.
Then I pointed them at each other and said, "rebrand my venture fund."
Our new website is the result.
We're a pre-seed and seed-stage fund backing AI-native healthcare companies. It would be weird if we didn't build our own brand with AI.
Honestly curious. Could you tell?
Keep building the future of healthcare you want for the next generation. Stay inspired. I'm rooting for you.