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General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja is looking to shape the future of healthcare through artificial intelligence.
"We always think about if you close your eyes and you said in 20 years you had a brand-new healthcare system, what should it look like? You would say it's proactive. Nobody wants to go to the hospital. People want to stay healthy. You want it to be affordable, you want it to be accessible," Taneja said in a new episode of Yahoo Finance's Opening Bid podcast (watch above; listen-only below).
ChatGPT and AI have helped turbocharge companies' ability to create building blocks that transform healthcare, Taneja added.
"With 4.5 billion people currently without access to essential healthcare services and a health worker shortage of 11 million expected by 2030, AI has the potential to help bridge that gap and revolutionize global healthcare," researchers at the World Economic Forum wrote earlier this year.
General Catalyst is one of the world's preeminent venture capital firms. The company counts itself as an early backer of buzzy names such as Airbnb (ABNB), Circle (CRCL), Stripe, Canva, Anduril Industries, and Gitlab.
In May, the company said it invested in 17 growth rounds and nine seed rounds. Taneja has been with the company for more than 23 years, including nearly five as CEO.
The company's focus on healthcare has been receiving its fair share of attention of late.
Last October, General Catalyst raised $8 billion in funding and is allocating more than $1 billion of that to healthcare companies. Taneja said about 20% of the company's current portfolio is invested in health.
The firm is focusing on companies using AI to make care cheaper and quicker and possibly prevent hospital visits altogether by being more predictive of patient needs.
One name in the portfolio is Commure, founded by Taneja in 2017 and launched in 2020. The healthcare services startup company recently struck a partnership with hospital operator HCA Healthcare (HCA) to deploy its AI platform Scribe. The platform provides automatic clinic documentation.
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Taneja said it's critical to have technology bring down the cost of care over time.
"We don't have a choice [to bring costs down]. It's [the healthcare system] breaking," Taneja explained. "If you look at many of the states, 50% of the budgets are Medicare budgets. So, at some point, you're really not investing enough in education and other sorts of core services in society as a nation if we don't get this [healthcare system] right. So it has to be solved."
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