Healthcare is slow. That's the opportunity.

Most of the capital rushing into healthcare right now has decided the hard part is over. It isn't. This is the one market where the fastest money is the most likely to misread the ground it's standing on, and the reason is the thing everyone treats as a bug.

I've built healthcare companies and divisions across my career. This year I've been assessing healthcare deals and advising healthcare companies, while building and running a new division outside of health. Both seats keep teaching me the same lesson. Healthcare is the slowest-moving large market in the economy, and that slowness is not the risk everyone prices it as. It's the opportunity, but only if you understand why the industry moves the way it does.

Digital health funding hit $14.2 billion in 2025, up 35% year over year and the strongest showing since 2022. AI-enabled companies took 54% of it, roughly $7.67 billion, up from 37% the year before, and they commanded a premium on deal size while they were at it. Rock Health's own read was that AI-native companies raised unusually large rounds unusually fast. Zoom out and the market is on the same curve: AI in healthcare was worth $36.7 billion in 2025 and is projected to clear $500 billion by 2033, compounding at nearly 39% a year. Very little in the economy grows like that.

So far, so exciting. Here's what the headline number leaves out.

Healthcare is not a market you can invest in the way you invest in software. Three forces bend every outcome here, and generalist capital tends to skip all three.

Regulation. Approval pathways are long, binary, expensive, and sit outside a founder's control.

Reimbursement. Who pays, and how much, is decided by payers and policy, not by how good the product is. A coverage decision can end a company that has everything else right.

Time. Health systems adopt slowly, and long feedback loops mean capital has to survive years before value shows up.

Underwriting a healthcare company on software comps is like buying a house off a photograph of the front door. Everything that can kill you is behind it.

Risk compounds differently here, so access to follow-on capital matters as much as the quality of the idea. Our own research on healthcare capital allocation put it more bluntly than I would have: participation in healthcare investing is easy, optimization is not. Most healthcare professionals are already investors, but their deals arrive through the same few networks, so their portfolios look diversified by count while sitting on identical regulatory and reimbursement risk. The binding constraint isn't intelligence or capital. It's access, and the portfolio design that carries a company through the exact moments where healthcare bets are won or lost.

The thing everyone complains about, how slowly healthcare changes, is the same thing that makes the opportunity large. Healthcare is the biggest, least-digitized sector of the economy, running on 50-plus disconnected workflows. For years, integration moved data between those systems. It never moved the work. People are still the workflow engine, and the bill for that shows up in the numbers nobody puts on a funding chart. Physicians work a 59-hour week on average, close to eight of those hours on administrative tasks, and one in five spends more than eight hours a week in the EHR after hours, the pajama time that follows them home. Almost half report at least one symptom of burnout. Meanwhile demand keeps outrunning supply: the AAMC projects a shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036, and its president David Skorton has been clear that training more physicians is necessary but can't close a gap that size, that fast.

That gap, between what the technology can do and what the system has actually adopted, is the whole opportunity. AI is the first tool shaped to fit it, as long as it's used as more than another point solution. The real gain isn't one more app bolted onto an old workflow. It's a system of work that sits on top of the systems of record and does the coordination people do by hand today. Ambient documentation tools already draft the visit note from the conversation in the room, and they've been adopted across most large U.S. systems. That's the early proof. The orchestration layer above them is the larger prize, because it hands a slow, fragmented, understaffed industry the one thing it cannot hire its way into: capacity.

How fast that adoption compounds once the tools cross the good-enough line. My bet is that it moves faster than the last decade trained us to expect, because the pain is now acute enough that inertia costs more than change. But I've been wrong about healthcare timelines before, and I'd rather say that out loud than pretend the curve is obvious.

Here's what I'm most sure of. Something is converging. The physician carrying an eight-hour pajama-time week and the investor hunting the next category-defining company have, for the first time, become interested in the same thing. Providers hold the truth about what's actually broken. Investors hold the capital to fix it. AI is the bridge. The people who can read both languages will see the best opportunities first, and that's the room worth being in.

Healthcare's slowness isn't the bug generalist capital thinks it is. It's the moat, and AI is the first key that fits the lock.

Reply and tell me what you're seeing. If you invest in healthcare, build for it, or deliver care inside it, I want your read on where this is real and where it's hype. I read every response.

PLANA — hybrid-electric aircraft for the trips that are too far to drive and too short to fly — PLANA is building hybrid-electric vertical-takeoff aircraft for regional travel, the trips its team describes as slow, costly, and inaccessible today. The design skips the charging network entirely, which removes the infrastructure barrier most electric aviation is still waiting on. Why we are excited: the team has built one of these before, with CEO Braden J. Kim having led Hyundai's urban air mobility vehicle program through the full-scale prototype it unveiled at CES 2020. In this category, the airframe is table stakes while certification is the hard part, so with the FAA opening new pathways, a credible route through it is what separates a prototype from a business.

Healiom — an AI coworker for the physician's office — Healiom is building the layer above the medical record, where agents answer the phone, book the visit, handle intake, and code the claim, working as coworkers rather than assistants. Why we are excited: our technical diligence found real architecture underneath rather than a thin wrapper, a clinical knowledge base with more than 40,000 hours of physician curation behind it that the model reasons over rather than predicting likely-sounding text, which is the difference that matters where a confidently wrong answer is a liability rather than an inconvenience.

For most of venture history, edge came from access. Who you knew, who called you first, whose inbox you happened to be in. That edge is thinning fast. As intelligence gets cheap, the question worth asking changes. It's no longer whether a company clears the bar against its competitors. It's who sees around the corner first. Pitch Protocol is built for that shift: structured founder data routed to funds by thesis, so what an investor sees is a function of their conviction rather than their network. And there's a compounding effect we're only starting to feel. Access was the old moat. Authentic insight is the new one. From the studio, that's the future we're building toward. Pitch to pitchprotocol.vc