Lightspeed Healthtech January Newsletter

January 29, 2026

We closed 2025 with $9B in new funds. We're entering 2026 with a thesis: Healthcare AI isn't displacing doctors—it's filling important gaps:

Demand that labor supply can't meet. Baseline activities that are burning out doctors. Latent demand that automation's cost and convenience unlocks.

Here's what we're seeing—and where we're headed.

The 2H 2025 Story: From Thesis to Traction

In our 1H newsletter, we highlighted investments in Abridge, Neko Health, Neuralink, Tennr, and flagged two areas we were excited about: administrative voice AI and clinical AI in primary care. Since then, we put capital behind that conviction.

Assort Health ($76M Series B, led by Lightspeed): Patient engagement platform powered by agentic and voice AI now managing 90M+ patient interactions across 20+ specialties.

Doctronic ($20M Series A, led by Lightspeed): 20M+ medical conversations completed—and a historic milestone as the first AI doctor in US history to legally prescribe routine medication refills.

These aren't demos. They're deployed systems delivering what AI "abundance" actually looks like for patients: more access, faster answers, and care that scales.

The pattern we're seeing is that healthcare is one of the fastest sectors for AI adoption. But sometimes the opportunity is still grounded in existing businesses and relationships. For these instances, we have been pioneering a path forward through an AI roll-up strategy. That's the logic behind Gyde, the first AI-native health brokerage, where we're deploying a new playbook that meshes M&A with AI. (More on that approach in The Investment Memo podcast.)

And on the infrastructure layer: after leading Anthropic's Series E, we tripled down to co-lead their $13B Series F. The company is now pushing deep into healthcare with Claude for Life Sciences and Claude for Healthcare. If you're exploring enterprise AI partnerships in health, reach out—we're actively making connections.

2026: Five Vectors We’re Pursuing

1

Access → Clinical AI as Vacuum Filler
AI isn't taking jobs from doctors. It's extending care teams to jobs they can't get to. Primary care and mental health face structural labor shortages that more training alone won't solve. Meanwhile, automation unlocks latent demand in areas like eye exams and dermatology screening—services people would use more if friction and cost disappeared.

2

Cost → The Employer Tipping Point
Healthcare costs have finally crossed the threshold where employers are demanding something different. We're watching innovation here closely, especially as CMMI's ACCESS program opens a pathway for AI-enabled employer approaches to extend into Medicare.

3

Quality of Life → Aging Well, Enabled by AI
The demographic math is unforgiving: the elder care system is straining under demand it was never built for. We're interested in AI that helps people maintain quality of life—whether at home, assisted living, or post-acute—giving them dignity through technology.

4

Healthcare Infrastructure → Accelerating Connectivity
The arms-race on Payer payment integrity and Provider RCM is at fever pitch. We’re looking to first principled solutions that lay down those arms, connecting at the primary record for real-time payer visibility, immediate provider payment, and ultimately, timely care for patients. 

Meanwhile, the accelerating Provider adoption of AI is creating a new channel for Pharma to tap into across patient access, commercial, and clinical trials.

5

New Frontiers → Working to Make The Impossible, Possible
Brain-computer interfaces remain a fascination, as do other technologies like robotics, where AI can unlock capabilities that seemed out of reach for human health and function. This is long-horizon work, but it's where transformational outcomes live.

Accelerating the Last Mile

Here's the tension: the technology is improving exponentially. But we believe institutional inertia—regulatory, reimbursement, adoption—remains the bottleneck to reaching patients and clinicians faster.

So we're turbocharging two vectors this year:

Go-to-Market:

  • An LP base representing some of the largest health systems in the country

  • Expanded Advisory Councils and Operating/Venture Partner teams

  • Partner Showcase Series with leading Payers and Providers

  • Lightspeed Podcasts (1M+ viewers and growing)

Regulatory:

  • Lightspeed's Government Affairs team is concentrating on health policy

  • Our Healthcare team has ramped up engagement in DC—most recently attending CMMI's ACCESS launch at HHS and delivering a keynote on Clinical AI at FDA

If you're building in healthcare AI and want to plug into this infrastructure, please reach out; we want to hear from you.

Looking Ahead

The promise of healthcare AI is no longer theoretical. The question now is velocity—how fast we can move from deployed systems to scaled impact. That's the work for 2026.

We're optimistic. Let's build.

Lightspeed Healthcare
Brenton Fargnoli, Galym Imanbayev, Jonathan MacQuitty, Naveed Matinfar, Ravi Mhatre, Shaurya Aggarwal, Shelley Chu, and Will Kohler