Years ago, when venture capitalist Jon Medved took an interest in backing various health tech startups, he had no idea that one day, he would need them to improve his own quality of life.
Israel tight-knit startup community received a blow in October when Medved, one of its most famous VCs, announced he was retiring immediately. He was forced to step down from the firm he founded, OurCrowd, after he was diagnosed with the debilitating disease of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS,) also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
“This has come rather sudden,” he told TechCrunch in an audibly hoarse voice — a symptom of ALS — on what could be his last interview.
“I had been feeling a little weird before and they didn’t know what was ailing me,” he explained. “I was in the hospital for several weeks recovering, and that’s when they tested me and said, ‘You’ve got ALS,’ which is a horrible disease, the worst you can imagine.”
ALS is a condition that degrades the brain’s motor neurons, leading to loss of muscle control, eventually impairing walking, talking, eating, and breathing. He didn’t have the classic symptoms, as his voice was attacked first, not his extremities, he said. But he knows that the condition will worsen, and there is no cure, only therapies.
Medved is considered one of the fathers of Israel’s startup ecosystem — often called “Startup Nation” after the decades-old best-selling book of the same name. He helped usher it in, having moved from California to Israel in his 20s, then founding and selling several tech companies before turning to investing.
In 2013, he founded OurCrowd. While Israel has many powerful home-grown VC firms, as well as branches of global firms like Bessemer, OurCrowd essentially invented crowdsourced venture capital, where a limited partnership was open to any accredited investor.
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The firm’s roster attracted LPs from Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North America, growing a network of 240,000 accredited investor LPs in 195 countries, the firm says. Many of them are doctors, lawyers, and ordinary people who not only help their investment companies, but would have otherwise been cut out of the wealth generation that VCs experience.
OurCrowd has backed names like Anthropic, Beyond Meat and Lemonade.
Medved describes OurCrowd as now a “significant player” backing about 500 portfolio companies with about 74 exits, including an exit a couple of weeks ago when its infrastructure planning startup Locusview sold for $525 million to Itron.
Despite Israel’s conflict with Gaza, which has impacted its citizens and put the nation in global crosshairs over the Palestinian humanitarian crisis, its startup ecosystem has remained strong.
As the “startup nation,” Israel remains a key player for cybersecurity and defense tech as well as AI, microchips, enterprise software, food tech, health tech — the whole tech stack. For example, in November, there was “$800 million invested in the Israeli venture ecosystem in one week,” Medved said. The country now has nearly 100 unicorns and over the year, he estimates that between $15 billion and $16 billion was invested in the country in venture deals.
Now the tech of some of these startups will help him navigate life with an incurable condition.
For instance, he’s had an avatar made of himself that preserves his voice, face and mannerisms. (The photo/video realistic digital twin is pictured and the full video can be seen here.) OurCrowd AI portfolio company D-ID, maker of agents and avatars, partnered with voice AI startup ElevenLabs and other companies through the ALS-focused Scott-Morgan Foundation to create an avatar system designed for people with ALS.
He just experienced this tech during a Zoom call with another person who has ALS who was using the avatar to communicate.
“So this stuff has become very, very personal to me,” Medved said. “It will preserve my voice when it goes.”
But he said there will be a variety of startups tech he will lean on.
“We’ve made 60, 70 healthcare investments in good companies that help people. We’ve got a company called OncoHost, which uses AI to help select what kind of immunotherapy will actually work for you … We have companies doing next-generation sequencing for the genome. We have companies doing chronic condition management,” he catalogs.
“I tell you now as a once-healthy person [who took health for granted] I felt human pain and disease, but once you are actually engaged in one of these nasty diseases, it changes your perspective,” Medved shared.
All of this means that, even though he’s given up his position running the company and may be retiring from the public eye, “I’m far from over, ok? I want to continue to contribute, both to OurCrowd and the overall ecosystem. So I fully intend to not go off [quietly] into this good night.”
And in the end, he says “I’m very proud that in a small way, even though all we are is investors, to be part of this movement.”
A video featuring Medved’s “digital twin” demonstrates just how realistic his avatar already is.
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