Emily Zhen

💡"Focusing on women-specific outcomes offers a real opportunity to create alpha by investing where competitors have not spent much time or capital, creating room for differentiation and early leadership." Kudos to Millie Nelson and BioXconomy for drawing attention to the positive impact of investing in women's health!

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Healthcare isn’t evolving gradually anymore. It’s being forced forward. That was the consistent message from the 300+ CEOs and healthcare leaders we had the privilege of hosting at our Wing at JPM Summit. Following the event, my teammate, Ansuman Satpathy, and I put together a 2026 predictions survey to capture how leaders across pharma, providers, payors, regulators, technologists, and investors see the next phase of healthcare unfolding. 👉 The therapeutic modality predicted to have the most impact in the next 5 years? CELL AND GENE THERAPIES, voted #1 by a whopping 44% of leaders (small molecules only got 12% of the votes). Take note, early-stage investors! 👉 Drug development is accelerating, with leaders predicting a 52% INCREASE in FDA approvals over the next decade 👉 Cost pressure is intensifying, with a median 15% expected reduction in administrative costs from AI within three years What excited me most wasn’t just the numbers. It's the shared belief that this moment will unlock truly personalized medicine, better interventions earlier in the care journey, and real progress on access that goes far beyond prescriptions. This is no longer an experimentation phase. It’s an acceleration moment for healthcare and biotech. See how healthcare leaders are thinking about 2026 in the full survey: https://lnkd.in/gt3YREWk @Wing Venture Capital

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After more than two decades of investing in healthcare, I've learned three things: be patient, resist trend-chasing, and wait until timing makes sense. With experience on dozens of boards, witnessing thousands of pitches, navigating frothy portfolio activity, and surviving the dud markets while waiting on good ones to return, I know that time and timing is key for success in healthcare investing. The challenge is, how do I convince LPs that the wait will be worth it? Peek at Relentless Venture Fund diversity of companies that span regenerative medicine to software-as-a-medical-device (SaMD), includes a repeat entrepreneur who practiced medicine, to technical founders who figured out IP rights in a way that only newbies to the industry would contemplate. The beauty of diversified portfolio construction, regulatory and risk balance. Deep bets take time. That's the opportunity in healthcare investing. BC has structural advantages that make deep bets work. World-class science from The University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, University of Victoria, BCCA and our research hospitals. Clinical trial facilities such as the new Phase 1 Clinical Trial Unit at Providence Health Care. Provincial commitment to the innovation ecosystem such as the government's participation in Aspect Biosystems' $200M, multi-year project to ensure a world class team thrives in a world class facility in our province. What would further amplify our potential? Procurement strategies that let BC companies prove themselves locally before going global. As a member of DIGITAL's investment committee, I evaluate and advance private/public partnerships that derisk technology and accelerate commercial adoption in BC and across Canada. These collaborations are shortening the path from lab to market. Timelines for liquidity in healthcare may be longer than other venture sectors, but the wins are foreshadowed years ahead. Canary Medical Inc. locked in a commercial partnership with Zimmer Biomet before regulatory approval. Aspect secured a $2.6B partnership with Novo Nordisk on pre-clinical data. Two BC founded, Relentless portfolio companies. It will be approximately one decade from our original investment in Aspect to their first human clinical trial. I am not fussed by the timeline. Each strategic partnership and validation of data by customers sets the stage for a high value exit. The beauty of investing in healthcare innovation is regulatory timelines are getting shorter and costs are dropping; innovation is expediting discovery, diagnosis, treatment and care options never imagined when I started my VC career. I know deep science takes time, and patient capital wins. And when they do, BC has an opportunity to capture value that historically flowed south. With the right policy support and patient capital aligned, we can continue to build category defining healthcare companies that scale from our province, not just launch here and relocate. Life Sciences BC

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Seen Health is one of our most impressive portfolio cos. They effectively rebuilt the PACE model from scratch where all clinical and ops workflows are AI native and the results have been outstanding. Seen has set the standard in PACE which is only the beginning. Kudos to Seen cofounders Xing S. & Yang Su who are expectional operators and certainly some of the best we’ve had the privilege to partner with at Virtue 👏🏼

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Something to note from Menlo Ventures's incredible AI in healthcare report....their data confirm what many of us in health systems already feel coming: AI adoption will INCREASE administrative volume before it reduces it. Payers expect, in the next 12–36 months: 63% major jump in call volume 50% more codes per claim 40%+ higher claim volume 38% more prior auths 31% more appeals + resubmissions When documentation gets easier, volume is going to skyrocket. Implications we’re already planning against: - AI adoption doesn’t remove work inherently; it redistributes it across the ecosystem. Workflow redesign is critical. - Providers need guardrails to prevent over-generation of documentation and requests. More noise helps noone. - Startups must show cross-stakeholder ROI, not siloed productivity gains... - Health systems need a system-wide AI playbook, or every local win creates a downstream backlog. This next 2-3 years will either widen payer–provider tension or force real alignment. I'm not counting on the latter. Curious how others are preparing.

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Matt Holt, former New Mountain Capital executive, is exploring a $30 billion deal to combine five health tech startups into a single platform called Thoreau. The venture would set out to simplify and integrate services across payers, providers and data — and if completed, it would rank among the largest private equity-backed health tech companies ever. Time will tell if this massive consolidation ever gets completed or translates into real value — or if it's just another bet on scale.

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