We at Andreessen Horowitz are excited to announce our investment into Counsel Health, as they offer consumers 24/7 access to personalized medical advice from expert physicians within minutes.
In a world where we can call a (driverless!) car, order a meal, and pay a friend -- all with a tap and a swipe on our phone -- we expect to find reliable medical answers about our health just as easily. It is no surprise that, today, the fastest-growing care setting isn’t the hospital or the home, it’s the mobile phone.
However, our healthcare system is under tremendous strain. Wait times to see a doctor in many cities can exceed 40 days, while patient messages for medical advice have increased sixfold in the past decade. Doctors deal with increasing information overload at the point of care, leading to worsening burnout, growing labor shortages, and greater barriers to accessing care.
Counsel Health is building a national medical practice that provides everyone unlimited, 24/7 access to personalized medical advice from expert physicians. Their solution is to go upstream of the problem: by providing the appropriate clinical expertise to patients right away, before they are bounced around the healthcare system, Counsel can prevent unnecessary medical expenses and avoidable stress. Under the hood, Counsel does this sustainably by empowering their clinicians with “Ironman suits for doctors” -- specialized medical co-pilots through which they leverage the collective knowledge of the best of their peers and multiply their patient reach well beyond traditional medical practices.
Muthu Alagappan, MD, along with Justin Yu, Rishi Khakhkhar, MD, MBA, and the rest of the Counsel team together bring a rare combination of experiences building AI systems, scaling healthcare operations, and delivering patient care with which to design a new care model for a post-large-language-model world.
We are thrilled to lead Counsel’s seed financing, alongside our friends Asymmetric (Rob Biederman, Nancy Chou), Floodgate (Ann Miura-Ko), Pear VC (Mar Hershenson, Vivien Ho),Founders You Should Know (Jennifer Yip), and many more.
Thanks to Counsel, we’re closer to a future in which everyone can feel like they have “a doctor in the family”.
a16z Bio + Health, Julie Yoo, Sherman L., Rajko Radovanović, Bowen Liu, William Shrank, Dan Rosenthal
