Cityblock Health is a New York-based, technology-driven healthcare company that delivers integrated primary care, behavioral health, and social services to Medicaid and dually eligible (Medicare-Medicaid) members in underserved communities. Spun out of Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs in 2017, Cityblock pairs neighborhood-based care teams with a custom care-management platform to treat the whole person - medical needs alongside housing, food, and other social drivers of health - under value-based, risk-sharing contracts with health plans. It serves more than 100,000 members across over ten states.
Zarminali Pediatrics is a venture-backed, multi-specialty pediatric care group building purpose-designed clinics that bundle primary care, urgent care, specialty care, behavioral health, and telehealth under one coordinated roof. Founded in 2024 by healthcare operator Danish Qureshi after his own family struggled to coordinate care for a child with an autoimmune disorder, the company has grown to roughly 28 clinics across 8 states and raised $110M in Series A funding (about $150M total) to fix what it calls a fragmented, broken pediatric system.
Sesame is a direct-pay, cash-only healthcare marketplace that lets patients shop for doctor visits, labs, imaging, prescriptions and specialty care online without insurance. Often called 'the Expedia for medical care,' it lists transparent prices from thousands of providers across all 50 states, with one-time visits starting around $39 and memberships from $19. Founded in 2018 by David Goldhill, Michael Botta and John Fontein, Sesame aims to strip bureaucracy out of healthcare so patients and clinicians transact directly.
Cecilia Aviles, MBA, BSN, RN, is the Chief Executive Officer of LifeLong Medical Care, a Federally Qualified Health Center serving over 55,000 patients across Contra Costa and Alameda Counties in the East Bay. A native San Franciscan who started her career as a trauma nurse, she brings more than 20 years of healthcare leadership experience — including 11 years at Sutter Health and earlier stints at Kaiser Permanente, UCSF, KPMG, and McKesson — to lead one of the Bay Area's most vital safety-net providers. A Carol Emmott Fellow and recognized among the Bay Area's top Hispanic nurses, she is committed to making healthcare accessible, equitable, and affordable for underserved communities.
HealthTap is a Sunnyvale-based digital health company that connects patients with board-certified physicians 24/7 through video, phone, and text consultations. Founded in 2010, it operates a platform of 105,000 doctors across 141 specialties serving 23 million monthly members. The company pairs AI-powered symptom checking with live clinical consultations, offering affordable virtual primary and urgent care via subscription or per-visit pricing. Recent partnerships with Samsung Health, Eli Lilly's LillyDirect, and Commure signal a shift toward deep integration with major consumer and clinical platforms.
Adam Farren is the CEO of Canvas Medical, a San Francisco-based programmable EMR platform accelerating everyday medicine through AI-powered clinical workflows. With nearly two decades of experience scaling venture-backed companies across healthcare, fintech, media, and education, Farren rose from teacher and high school basketball coach to one of healthcare tech's most active growth operators. He spent eight combined years as Chief Growth Officer at Elation Health and Osmind before joining Canvas as President and COO in April 2023, then ascending to CEO in September 2024. Under his leadership, Canvas launched Hyperscribe - an open-source AI clinical copilot - and the Backplane platform for AI agent deployment, betting that the agentic future of medicine runs on open, programmable infrastructure.
Vasiliki 'Vicky' Demas, PhD, is the CEO and founder of identifeye HEALTH, an AI-enabled retinal imaging company that brings specialized eye screening to primary care settings. A chemical engineer by training with a PhD from UC Berkeley and a postdoc at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, she cut her teeth as a founding member of Google Life Sciences (which became Verily) and helped build foundational technology for GRAIL's Galleri multi-cancer early detection test. At identifeye HEALTH — which she joined in 2021 and rebranded from Tesseract Health — she leads a 38-person team developing a portable, FDA-registered AI retinal camera that lets minimally trained staff detect diabetic retinopathy and systemic disease markers in the same visit patients already make to their primary care doctor.
Samantha Walter is a Healthcare Partner on the Bio + Health team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she helps portfolio companies grow by building strategic partnerships across the care delivery ecosystem - payors, providers, employers, and retail. A University of Wisconsin-Madison finance graduate originally from Minneapolis, she brings deep operational credibility to the VC world: before joining a16z, she built a Direct Contracting Entity at Carelon (then CareMore/Aspire under Anthem/Elevance) in 2020, drove customer success at Quartet Health, and cut her teeth as a healthcare revenue cycle consultant at Huron Consulting Group in New York City. She lives and works in NYC, bridging Silicon Valley capital with real-world healthcare infrastructure.