Pear Healthcare Playbook

Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Every week, we'll be getting to know trailblazing healthcare leaders and diving into building a digital health and biotech business from 0 to 1.We would greatly appreciate it if you took a moment to listen to the episode on either Apple or Spotify and leave us a rating! Your support helps our guests' insights reach a larger audience!Today we're thrilled to share our interview with Andrew Lacy, Founder and CEO of Prenuvo, a whole-body MRI screening company. Prenuvo has screened more than 100,000 people across over 170,000 scans, raised more than $190 million across five funding rounds. In this conversation, Andrew walks through why MRI is a great imaging modality for whole-body screening, how Prenuvo thinks about pricing and the FSA/HSA system, what its own published research shows and doesn't show, and how the company is navigating a vocal, organized pushback from parts of the radiology establishment while trying to make proactive screening the standard of care instead of just a luxury good.

Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook!Today we’re thrilled to host Dr. Teodor Grantcharov, founder and CEO of Aimbient, formerly known as Surgical Safety Technologies. Aimbient is building the intelligence layer for procedural care, using ambient AI to improve patient safety, clinical outcomes, and operational efficiency. Building on Teodor’s pioneering work developing the OR Black Box, Aimbient has expanded to more than 650 procedural rooms across North America and Europe.In this episode, we discuss Teodor’s journey from surgeon-scientist to entrepreneur, the challenges of bringing the OR Black Box into hospitals, and how Aimbient is evolving from retrospective surgical analysis to predictive and real-time intelligence across procedural care.

Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Today we’re thrilled to host Wyatt McDonnell, co-founder and CEO of Infinimmune. Founded in 2022, Infinimmune is taking a new approach to antibody drug discovery by using the human immune system as a guide. Their thesis is that some of the best therapeutic antibodies may already exist within people and the company combines large-scale single-cell sequencing of human B cell repertoires with its proprietary discovery platform and antibody language models to identify and engineer human-derived therapeutics. Infinimmune has built an internal pipeline across inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, announced an $838 million multi-target antibody discovery collaboration with Merck, and raised a $75 million Series A as of August 2026.In this conversation, Wyatt explains how Infinimmune finds promising antibodies in the human immune repertoire and engineers them for therapeutic development. He also explains what it takes to build a durable therapeutics company around a discovery platform.

Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Every week, we'll be getting to know trailblazing healthcare leaders and diving into building a digital health and biotech business from 0 to 1.We would greatly appreciate it if you took a moment to listen to the episode on either Apple or Spotify and leave us a rating! Your support helps our guests' insights reach a larger audience!Today we're thrilled to share our interview with Vikas Sabnani, Co-founder and CEO of Marit Health, a free, AI-powered career community platform built for physicians and advanced practice providers. Clinicians share their own compensation data and in exchange get access to tens of thousands of real peer-reported salaries across every specialty and state, including the details that actually matter like base pay, bonuses, call schedules, hours worked, PTO, and benefits. Think of it as a Glassdoor for medicine. Marit also runs an AI powered jobs platform that matches clinicians to roles based on their specific preferences. In just fifteen months since launching, more than 100,000 clinicians have joined, making Marit one of the fastest growing community platforms in medicine [1]. Before Marit, Vikas spent seven years at Glassdoor and then joined Transcarent as head of product. In this conversation, Vikas walks through his path from Glassdoor to healthcare, how Marit's co-founder started the company on a Google Sheet, the anonymization architecture that protects physicians in small specialties, and how the platform is turning transparency into a business.

Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Every week, we'll be getting to know trailblazing healthcare leaders and diving into building a digital health and biotech business from 0 to 1.We would greatly appreciate it if you took a moment to listen to the episode on either Apple or Spotify and leave us a rating! Your support helps our guests' insights reach a larger audience!Today we're thrilled to share our interview with Arpan Parikh, MD and Amit Parikh, MD, and Kyle Alwyn, the co-founders of Kin Health, a free app that records patients' doctor visits, turns them into a plain-English summary with next steps, and helps them act on what they were told. Kin closed a $9 million seed round with GoodRx co-founders Doug Hirsch and Trevor Bezdek joining as founding partners and executive chairmen.1 In this conversation, Arpan, Amit, and Kyle walk through the personal and professional catalysts behind Kin, how the company is borrowing (and adapting) the GoodRx playbook, how Kin complies with security and privacy, and how they think about consent in a world where both doctor and patient are now showing up to the visit with their own AI listening in.

Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook!Today we’re thrilled to host Sahir Jaggi, founder and CEO of Forus, formerly known as Tandem. Forus is building the infrastructure layer for medication access, helping providers navigate the complex journey from prescription to treatment. The company recently announced that it has raised more than $160 million and now supports thousands of practices across all 50 states.In this episode, we discuss Sahir’s journey from Oscar Health to founding Forus, why medication access remains so broken, and how Forus grew from individual clinics into a nationwide provider network.

Today we're thrilled to host David Lortscher, MD, co-founder and board chair of Curology, the personalized prescription skincare company he built out of a telehealth experiment in 2014. Curology has since grown into a business that has served more than 5 million patients. After a decade as CEO, David stepped back into the board chair role in 2022 and has since written Why Doctors Win: The Doctor's Guide to Creating or Joining a High-Impact Startup, based on exclusive interviews with physician founders of ten category-leading healthcare companies. In this conversation, David walks through how he first started the company, raising investor money as a physician, how he built a compounding pharmacy, growing to a 50-state clinician network, and discusses his new book!

Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Every week, we'll be getting to know trailblazing healthcare leaders and diving into building a digital health and biotech business from 0 to 1.Today we're thrilled to host Mark Cuban, co-founder of the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company. Cost Plus launched in 2022 with a simple promise: sell generic drugs at the actual cost plus a transparent 15% markup, no hidden fees, no middlemen. In this conversation, Mark walks through how a cold email turned into a company that's now taking on the entire pharmacy benefit infrastructure of the country, from generics to manufacturing to direct provider contracting.

Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Today we’re thrilled to host Ron Alfa, co-founder and CEO of Noetik. Noetik is building an AI-native platform for cancer biology, generating large-scale human data to train biological foundation models that both predict patient responses to therapy and uncover new drug targets and treatment opportunities. Most recently, Noetik signed a $50 million licensing agreement with GSK, giving GSK access to Noetik’s virtual cell foundation models, along with one of the largest multimodal spatial oncology datasets assembled to date. In this episode, we discuss Ron’s journey to founding Noetik, why building truly useful models of biology requires large-scale, multimodal human data, and how biological foundation models can transform precision oncology. We also explore what it takes to build an AI-native biotech company, lessons from partnering with pharma, the future of drug discovery, and the path toward bringing more personalized cancer treatment to every patient.

Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Every week, we’ll be getting to know trailblazing healthcare leaders and diving into building a digital health and biotech business from 0 to 1.We would greatly appreciate it if you took a moment to listen to the episode on either Apple or Spotify and leave us a rating! Your support helps our guests' insights reach a larger audience!Today we're thrilled to host Anirudh Joshi, co-founder of Valar Labs, who is building the company with co-founder Viswesh Krishna. Valar is pioneering AI-native oncology diagnostics using standard pathology slides to predict treatment response, starting with bladder cancer and expanding across oncology. The company raised a $22M Series A co-led by DCVC and Andreessen Horowitz, with continued backing from Pear VC since day one. In this conversation, Anirudh walks through how the genesis of the company, why pathology has long been underutilized and what it took to bring Vesta, its genitourinary-focused portfolio of AI powered pathology tests, to the clinic.