Author: openjargon

• We asked top investors at firms like A16z and NEA to name healthcare's most promising startups.
• Most of their picks are using AI, automating in critical areas like healthcare hiring and payments.
• Meet the 18 healthcare startups investors have been watching in 2025.

Healthcare investors are chomping at the bit to fund hot startups tackling administrative burdens, workforce shortages, and high medical costs with new technologies.

We asked 10 investors from VC firms, private equity shops, and family offices to identify the most promising healthcare startups of 2025.

Top backers from firms like Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, and Oak HC/FT were asked to make two picks each: one healthcare startup from their portfolio, and one they have no financial interest in.

Nearly every startup nominated is utilizing AI in their products, from automating hospital back-end tasks to assisting patients with questions about their payments. Healthcare AI startups have dominated digital health VC funding so far this year, capturing nearly $4 billion of the $6.4 billion raised across the industry in the first half of 2025, according to Rock Health.

Here's the full list of the most promising healthcare startups of 2025, according to investors.

Akasa

Nominated by: Julie Yoo, Andreessen Horowitz (an investor)

Total funding: $250 million, according to the company

What it does: Akasa, also known as Akasa Health, aims to automate hospital revenue cycle management using AI.

Why it's promising: Healthcare RCM has been a red-hot market for VC and private equity investment this year. Akasa sells its tech to top hospitals, including Cleveland Clinic, Duke, and Johns Hopkins; Yoo said Akasa has won these customers because the company solves problems other healthcare RCM companies haven't cracked, including full automation of billing and claims processing.

A16z led Akasa's seed and Series A rounds. The startup last raised $125 million in Series C funding in 2022, led by Coatue Management.

Cadence

Nominated by: Austin Walters, SpringTide Ventures (not an investor)

Total funding: $141 million, according to the company

What it does: Cadence helps patients manage chronic conditions with remote monitoring tech and telehealth.

Why it's promising: Cadence now serves over 60,000 patients across 20 health systems, including Hackensack Meridian and Providence. The company told Business Insider that it has seen 100% year-over-year revenue growth in 2025 and is on track to surpass $100 million in annual recurring revenue by 2026.

"They have done a great job of successfully selling into health systems to aid with remote patient care and monitoring of the elderly," Walters said. "While they raised a lot of money in the ZIRP days, they have managed cash well since then, and are a solid player in the landscape."

Carefam

Nominated by: Allison Baum Gates, SemperVirens (an investor)

Total funding: $14 million, according to the company

What it does: Carefam offers an AI-powered hiring platform that connects nurses and other clinicians with open roles, while assisting them with related tasks such as resume review and interview preparation.

Why it's promising: Healthcare faces an ever-worsening workforce shortage, Gates noted. Carefam creates a "best of both worlds" scenario for AI's role in healthcare, she said — using AI to more quickly match people to the right clinical roles that AI can't replace.

The company said it's live across hundreds of healthcare facilities, with more than 30,000 clinicians active on the platform.

Chai Discovery

Nominated by: Vig Chandramouli, Oak HC/FT (no financial relationship)

Total funding: $100 million, according to the company

What it does: Chai builds AI models that predict molecular structures and design new antibodies to accelerate drug development.

Why it's promising: Chai has been off to the races since its 2024 founding. The startup raised a $70 million Series A round in August, led by Menlo Ventures. Thrive Capital, OpenAI, and Dimension led its $30 million seed round the year prior.

Chandramouli pointed to Chai's "exceptional" technical team, comprising a mix of top AI bio researchers and alumni from tech companies such as OpenAI, Meta, and Stripe.

"They've shown quickly and effectively how they can solve problems that previously took many years and millions of dollars," he said.

Clasp

Nominated by: Irem Rami, Norwest Venture Partners (no financial relationship)

Total funding: $50.4 million

What it does: Clasp connects health systems with aspiring clinicians, often while they're still in training, to provide student loan repayment programs tied to post-graduation employment.

Why it's promising: Clasp wants to tackle healthcare's workforce shortage and the student debt crisis at the same time with programs that the company likens to ROTC, but for medicine instead of the military.

Clasp said it's reached $100 million in student loan commitments across top healthcare systems, including Boston Children's Hospital and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. The company was also named to Business Insider's 2025 list of startups to bet your career on in February.

"By better connecting students with opportunities, Clasp is helping providers build sustainable workforces in a highly competitive environment," Rami said.

Courier Health

Nominated by: Irem Rami, Norwest Venture Partners (an investor)

Total funding: $24 million, according to the company

What it does: Courier Health sells a customer relationship management platform to biopharma companies to help them coordinate and support patients, especially those on specialty drugs.

Why it's promising: Courier Health links fragmented patient and provider data to help drugmakers understand patient journeys and improve medication access and adherence. In 2025, the company said it quadrupled its client base and more than doubled its headcount.

"Courier Health is transforming the way pharma engages with patients by providing visibility across the entire patient journey. Their platform ensures the right patients are connected with the right therapies at the right time, ultimately improving access, adherence, and outcomes," Rami said.

Diana Health

Nominated by: Blake Wu, NEA (an investor)

Total funding: $101 million, according to the company.

What it does: Diana Health offers women's healthcare across gynecology, maternity, menopause, and wellness, with virtual and in-person services.

Why it's promising: Diana partners with hospitals to design and operate women's care programs, pairing nurse-midwives with specialists like OB-GYNs and mental health clinicians for care in the hospitals or at outpatient clinics. The startup raised $55 million in Series C funding in September, led by HealthQuest Capital, to keep expanding its footprint. Diana Health now works with nine hospitals in Tennessee, Florida, and Texas.

Wu noted that women's health, especially maternity care, has historically been a challenging area for startups. He said Diana's model yields better health outcomes for patients while controlling costs.

"We've evaluated dozens of startups in the space, and our view is that Diana's clinical model is unique and highly differentiated," he said.

Inbox Health

Nominated by: Steve Piaker and Kyle Kruse, Ten Coves (an investor)

Total funding: $55 million, according to the company

What it does: Inbox Health automates patient billings for healthcare practices, with AI-powered support tools to help those patients understand their payments.

Why it's promising:

Inbox's AI-powered tools aim to simplify and speed up payments for providers. The company said it's now working with over 3,500 healthcare practices and over 2.8 million patients a year.

Ten Coves led a $20 million growth equity funding round for Inbox Health in October.

"It is our belief that as high-deductible health insurance plans continue to proliferate, Inbox Health's suite of AI-powered patient engagement and payment solutions are well-positioned to scale and address the need for improved patient collections and greater back-office efficiency, a multi-billion-dollar industry pain point," Piaker and Kruse said in an email to Business Insider.

Infinitus

Nominated by: Ilya Fushman, Kleiner Perkins (an investor)

Total funding: $102.9 million, according to the company

What it does: Infinitus builds AI agents to handle administrative tasks, especially phone calls, in healthcare across pharma companies, health plans, and provider organizations.

Why it's promising: Fushman said Infinitus has had a breakout year as it works to automate time-consuming tasks for healthcare organizations, such as benefits verification, prior authorizations, and prescription follow-ups. This month, the startup rolled out new tech for pharma companies selling directly to patients, including providing around-the-clock answers to patient questions about their medications.

Fushman led Infinitus's seed and Series A rounds. He said Infinitus already supports 44% of the Fortune 50, two of the five national payers, and eight of the 10 biggest life sciences companies, and pointed to its partnership with Salesforce, which offers Infinitus's voice AI agents to customers of Salesforce's life sciences cloud platform. "Their enterprise partnership momentum continues to accelerate," Fushman said.

Knownwell

Nominated by: Jannick Dam Mortensen, Maj Invest (no financial relationship)

Total funding: $50 million, according to the company

What it does: Knownwell provides integrated obesity care, including primary care and weight management, in person and virtually.

Why it's promising: As demand for obesity care skyrockets, Knownwell has expanded to 10 brick-and-mortar clinics across the US. The startup announced a fresh $25 million in funding in October, led by CVS Health Ventures and including Andreessen Horowitz, a previous investor, to power its continued growth.

Knownwell also notched a deal in April to offer its weight care services through Eli Lilly's direct-to-consumer digital health platform, LillyDirect.

Mortensen said the company provides a care experience for patients that's "highly individualized and comprehensive."

Nudge

Nominated by: Ilya Fushman, Kleiner Perkins (no financial relationship)

Total funding: $100 million, according to PitchBook

What it does: Nudge aims to create "whole-brain interfaces," using ultrasound technology to image and stimulate the brain, to enable treatments for neurological conditions such as addiction and essential tremors.

Why it's promising: Nudge has a tall task ahead of it: creating dynamic maps of the brain by combining complex neuroscience with hardware and software. Fushman highlighted Nudge's usage of non-invasive technology for both imaging and precise brain stimulation.

The startup raised $100 million in Series A funding in July, co-led by Thrive Capital and Greenoaks, to tackle that challenge.

Nudge's CEO, Fred Ehrsam, previously cofounded Coinbase and is a general partner at crypto VC firm Paradigm. Nudge's founding team also includes a former Neuralink product VP.

In the longer term, Nudge has said it wants to build consumer-grade products to help broader populations better understand their brains in everyday life. The startup didn't respond to requests for comment from Business Insider for this story.

Payzen

Nominated by: Blake Wu, NEA (no financial relationship)

Total funding: $87 million, according to the company

What it does: Payzen works with health systems and physician groups to offer no-cost payment plans to patients for out-of-pocket medical bills.

Why it's promising: Nearly half of Americans find it difficult to afford their healthcare costs, according to a KFF poll published earlier this year. Amid healthcare's affordability crisis, Payzen's approach stands out, Wu said.

The startup uses AI underwriting models to create personalized payment plans that patients are more likely to stick to, thereby increasing revenue for providers.

"Across our investment portfolio, we're looking for opportunities where we can help align incentives and improve outcomes for all healthcare stakeholders, starting with the patient," Wu said. "In our work in the category, PayZen's model emerged as the most unique that we have seen."

RapidClaims

Nominated by: Steve Piaker and Kyle Kruse, Ten Coves (no financial relationship)

Total funding: $11 million, according to PitchBook

What it does: RapidClaims sells AI-powered software to healthcare provider organizations to help them capture more revenue.

Why it's promising: RapidClaims is another startup riding the wave of VC interest into healthcare revenue cycle management. Founded in 2023, the startup sells AI tools to automate medical coding, claims management, and denials prevention, among other back-end financial tasks. The startup raised $8 million in a Series A funding round in April, led by VC firm Accel.

Piaker and Kruse said RapidClaims' tech is compelling in its potential not only to speed up cash collection for providers but to eliminate compliance concerns and manual errors in the process.

RapidClaims didn't respond to requests for comment from Business Insider for this story.

Stedi

Nominated by: Julie Yoo, Andreessen Horowitz (no financial relationship)

Total funding: $92 million, according to the company

What it does: Stedi handles and routes transactions between healthcare providers and insurers.

Why it's promising: Stedi is a tech-first healthcare clearinghouse, a central entity that enables doctors to check patients' insurance eligibility, submit claims, track the status of those claims, and receive payment. The startup makes the process more efficient with APIs, which connect disparate software systems, allowing customers to send and receive data via Stedi automatically.

The company said it signed hundreds of new customers in 2025. It also raised a $70 million Series B funding round co-led by fintech company Stripe and VC firm Addition in August.

"We've had a number of highly unfortunate outage events in recent years that shed light on the scale, complexity, and fragility of some of the core, but often legacy, infrastructure systems on which the industry relies. Stedi is one of the upstarts that is giving said infrastructure a seriously needed upgrade," Yoo said.

Stepful

Nominated by: Vig Chandramouli, Oak HC/FT (an investor)

Total funding: Over $50 million, according to the company

What it does: Stepful offers online training for entry-level healthcare jobs, as well as career services to help recent graduates find roles after certification.

Why it's promising: Founded in 2021, Stepful aims to reduce barriers to entry for healthcare jobs by offering short, online, and affordable training programs for positions like medical assistants and pharmacy technicians.

Stepful has introduced AI-powered tools to give students feedback on their work and coach them if they're falling behind. The startup also partners with healthcare organizations on hiring and upskilling their existing workers.

"This is a team that is obsessed with understanding their target consumer and building a product that enables market-leading graduation rates, with over 30,000 students graduated to date," Chandramouli said.

Teal Health

Nominated by: Allison Baum Gates, SemperVirens (no financial relationship)

Total funding: $23 million, according to the company

What it does: Teal Health enables women to screen for cervical cancer at home with at-home kits paired with telehealth support.

Why it's promising: Teal Health received FDA authorization for its at-home cervical cancer screening wand in May, after raising an additional $10 million in seed funding in January.

The wand, the first do-it-yourself cervical cancer testing tool in the US, could help close the gap in cancer screenings. About one in four women in the US are behind on their Pap smears, according to the National Cancer Institute. That care gap is one of the likely contributors to the recent rise in preventable advanced-stage cervical cancer cases.

"I truly believe they are revolutionizing a critical piece of women's healthcare and following in an important trend of the consumerization of women's health and the rising need for women to take control of their own health," Gates said.

Twin Health

Nominated by: Jannick Dam Mortensen, Maj Invest (an investor)

Total funding: $308 million, according to the company

What it does: Twin Health creates AI "digital twins" of patients using data from wearables, lab tests, and other inputs, to care for metabolic conditions like obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Why it's promising: Mortensen pointed to a Twin Health study published in the New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst in August. Led by Cleveland Clinic clinicians, the study found that Twin Health's programs helped diabetes patients lower their A1C without blood sugar-lowering medications like GLP-1s.

Alongside the study's August publication, Twin Health announced it had raised a $53 million Series E round, led by Maj Invest, to sell to more health plans and Fortune 500 clients. Twin Health is also backed by VC heavyweights like Sequoia Capital and ICONIQ Growth, with customers including Dayforce and Blackstone.

Twin Health's founder and CEO, Jahangir Mohammed, previously founded tech company Jasper, which was sold to Cisco in 2016 for $1.4 billion.

Wellsheet

Nominated by: Austin Walters, SpringTide Ventures (an investor)

Total funding: $12 million, according to the company

What it does: Wellsheet uses AI to surface relevant and actionable clinical information from a patient's electronic health record for doctors and care teams.

Why it's promising: Wellsheet is gaining traction as hospitals struggle with clinician burnout and data overload. The startup's tech is live in over 100 US hospitals, including health system Ascension Health. Founded in 2015, the company said it tripled its revenue in the last 12 months, and Walters said Wellsheet has increased its user base fivefold so far this year.

Walters pointed to previous efforts by tech giants like Google to consolidate and analyze health record data.

"Google couldn't solve the real-time enterprise visibility and interoperability challenge at Ascension, but Wellsheet was able to beat out this major tech incumbent because of its unmatched ease of implementation and use — and the fact that the team has developed SaaS that actually works for the way multidisciplinary care teams at hospitals run," Walters said.

In July 2024, Magdalena Robinson was laid off from her job as a vice president of talent acquisition at a media agency. The news came as a shock — by all accounts she was doing well — but she saw a silver lining: Maybe it was finally time for a career break. She took the rest of the year off, soaking in the extra time with her husband and teenage daughter. Then she started applying for jobs in January.

Eleven months and 300 applications later, she still doesn't have a single offer.

"I don't know what's going on right now," she tells me. She has a great resume lined with reputable employers and a steady ascension to bigger titles. And as a recruiting executive, she thought she knew how to navigate the modern job market. Was it her age? Her experience? Some black hole sucking up all her applications before they ever reached a human being? "I think about what I've done in my professional life," she says. "And I'm like, am I that unemployable?"

It's a question I've heard from dozens of professional jobseekers I've spoken to over the last two years. They're accomplished and articulate and seem like exactly the kind of candidates companies say they want. Why are so many of them struggling in an economy with low unemployment?

One explanation is the unusual nature of the current market. Many businesses stopped hiring after overstaffing in the pandemic, leaving too few openings to go around — especially in white-collar, middle-manager roles. But a hiring slowdown alone isn't enough to capture just how hellish the white-collar job search has become. Something deeper is going on.

At the heart of it is Robinson's application count: 300. A few years ago, a number like that would have floored me. Now, it's utterly ordinary. Two other people I spoke to recently told me they've applied to more than a thousand roles.

To see how bad it's gotten, I asked Greenhouse, one of the leading providers of hiring software, to take a look at their data. Last quarter, the average job opening received 242 applications — nearly triple the amount in 2017, when the unemployment rate was at a comparable level. That means that when someone submits a resume today, they have the abysmally low 0.4% chance of actually getting the job. (That's just for the average job. At the big-name employers, the odds are even worse.) Applying to a job in 2025 really is the statistical equivalent of hurling your resume into a black hole.

You'd think employers would be loving this, getting to pick from such a big pool of candidates. But they're just as frustrated. Recruiters are swamped with resumes, many from people who aren't remotely qualified for the roles they're hiring, and they're completely unequipped to sort through the deluge. The result is something far more dangerous than a hiring slump. Gridlocked to the point of paralysis, the job market isn't working.

"Nobody's happy with the current situation," says Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait. "Something broke in the technology."

This isn't the first time a market's grown so overcrowded it stopped functioning. Economists even have a name for it: congestion. Big markets hold the promise of creating better matches, but they also tend to devolve into total chaos.

"Congestion is the bane of a lot of markets," says Alvin Roth, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Stanford who's helped design programs to better match students with schools, organ donors with patients, and hospitals with new doctors. "Successful marketplaces have to fight hard to defeat congestion."

Take what happened in the early days of the romantic equivalent of job sites, online dating. Gaining access to a seemingly infinite number of potential partners, men bombarded the inboxes of the hottest women. Overwhelmed, those women didn't reply. So the men messaged even more women, sending generic "hey"s they could recycle over and over again. The women hated that even more. The result? A vicious cycle of spam and rejection. Few people found love.

Over the last three decades, something similar has played out in the labor market. Before the internet, job seekers had to pore over the classifieds in newspapers, trek to Kinko's to print out their resumes, and mail them off — and then wait weeks or months to hear back. Job sites like Monster and CareerBuilder changed all that, centralizing job listings into one searchable forum and letting people apply on the spot. Every innovation since then — from email job alerts to LinkedIn's Easy Apply button — made applying ever more seamless. That very convenience, though, also encouraged people to send out more applications. Recruiters tried to keep up with the influx, learning to skim resumes in mere seconds.

On Greenhouse, the applications-to-recruiter ratio is now 500 to 1, four times what it was four years ago.

The tipping point, Chait says, came when ChatGPT arrived just as companies slammed the brakes on hiring. Faced with fewer callbacks, candidates turned to AI to churn out more applications, customizing resumes and cover letters to each job at the click of a button. Some even deployed bots to mass-apply on their behalf. In a recent Greenhouse survey, 74% of candidates said they use AI in their job search. The surge in volume increased competition for each job even further, prompting people to cast wider nets and apply to roles they were less suited for.

Recruiters, meanwhile, were left to manage the flood alone. And as companies shrank their HR teams in the white-collar downturn, the workload only grew. On Greenhouse, the applications-to-recruiter ratio is now 500 to 1, four times what it was four years ago. Stretched thin, recruiters resorted to emergency triage — say, skimming only the first 100 resumes, or considering just the candidates with referrals. That's come at the expense of missing out on so many qualified candidates. Which has led to a bizarre observation I'm hearing from more and more companies: They're getting no shortage of eager applicants, but they're still having a hard time finding good hires.

"The forces that make it cheap to send more applications are working faster than the forces that allow you to quickly process many applications," says Roth. "We're deep into congestion."

Chait started seeing the warning signs in late 2022. But it was last year that he remembers thinking: "OK, this is really happening." Suddenly the crisis was everywhere: in Greenhouse's data, in its surveys of jobseekers, in conversations with customers. So he marshalled his staff to try every fix they could imagine.

One of the first was a new website where candidates can manage their applications to Greenhouse's clients. There, it introduced a feature called Dream Job, which lets people mark one application a month as a job they especially want. The idea is that recruiters don't just want qualified applicants. They want to know — amid the sea of people applying with a single click — who's actually serious enough that they'd likely accept an offer.

Online daters might recognize the concept as the "rose" on Hinge or the "super like" on Tinder — gestures borrowed from a landmark study in market design. Dream Job launched in June, and the early data is promising: Employers have been five times more likely to hire Dream Job applicants than standard ones.

Human beings are still good at a lot of things machines aren't. We're sort of wired to figure out who we are like and who we should like.Alvin Roth, Nobel Prize-winning economist

Other intermediaries of the job market are trying their own fixes. LinkedIn, for instance, introduced its own "rose," called Top Choice, to its premium members (Top Choice candidates, the platform says, are 43% more likely to get a recruiter message). It also shows people whether they're a high, medium, or low match for the roles they view ("try exploring other jobs," it gently advises low-match candidates). And this year it's been testing daily limits on Easy Apply submissions.

While these measures might help on the margins, to me they feel like slapping band-aids on a severed limb. In the age of AI-generated mass applications, companies will never be able to keep up until they have tools that can evaluate candidates at scale — and so far those tools have been lacking.

Job seekers now widely assume employers are already using AI to reject them. In reality, many of the companies I've spoken to have been hesitant to adopt AI screening, fearing they'll run afoul of regulations banning potentially discriminatory hiring practices. Their caution makes sense: Already, a group of job seekers has sued Workday, alleging its AI-powered technology disproportionately screens out older candidates. In May, a federal judge let the case move forward as a collective action, paving the way for more people to join the lawsuit. "We deny the allegations in the suit," a Workday spokesperson wrote in an email. "Our products, both AI-enabled and not, are built to help our customers manage this increasing volume of applicants with a focus on human decision-making."

Greenhouse is taking a different approach. It's testing a tool that, for every job opening, allows hiring managers to essentially teach the system the kind of candidates it's looking for, ranking which attributes matter most. The company plans to roll it out to a broader set of customers next year. "We can help you do it more rapidly with an algorithm," Chait says. "But it's not like there's a secret Greenhouse algorithm that's going to tell you who to look at."

If that works, it could be an improvement on the current market, where so many qualified resumes go unseen. Still, it assumes hiring managers know what they're looking for — and that what they want is in fact what the company needs. Roth, who's spent much of his career studying different labor markets, notes there's still so much we don't understand about how we decide who to hire — especially the intuition behind those decisions that might be hard for software to replicate. "Human beings are still good at a lot of things machines aren't," he says. "We're sort of wired to figure out who we are like and who we should like and who's on our team and could be on our team."

Robinson, the recruiting executive, prided herself on that very intuition throughout her career. For her, a good hire doesn't emerge from a mechanical formula of credentials — it's about recognizing the potential of who the candidate could become. "You can't be so close-minded to say, 'Oh, you have to check all the boxes,'" she says.

Being on the other side of the table now, it's the kind of potential she longs for someone to see in her. But every rejection has made it harder and harder to hold out that hope, and in this broken job market, she can't afford to wait forever. For now, she's taken a job at a grocery store so her daughter won't have to quit figure skating. "It breaks my heart that I can't provide what I was providing," Robinson says. "I just want to work."

Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.

• Michael Burry of "The Big Short" has pivoted from investing to financial writing.
• Burry's first two posts on his new Substack discuss his history as a blogger and skepticism of AI.
• The market veteran warns of overinvestment and says Nvidia is the Cisco of this tech boom.

Michael Burry of "The Big Short" fame has pivoted from investing to writing, launching a paywalled Substack called "Cassandra Unchained."

The blog is now Burry's "sole focus" and promises a "front row seat to his analytical efforts and projections for stocks, markets, and bubbles, often with an eye to history and its remarkably timeless patterns."

Burry has published two initial posts, one titled "Foundations: My 1999 (and part of 2000)" and the other titled "The Cardinal Sign of a Bubble: Supply-Side Gluttony."

The former recalls his time as a neurology resident at Stanford University Hospital, where he wrote about value investing at night.

"As I devote myself to Cassandra Unchained, I find myself on an old road not taken," it reads. "I feel lucky, and I am grateful for the opportunity as I walk it again."

The second post aims straight at the heart of the AI boom, which he calls a "glorious folly" that will require investigation over several posts to break down.

Burry goes on to take aim at a common argument about the difference between the dot-com bubble and AI boom — that the companies 25 years ago were largely unprofitable while the current crop are money-printing machines.

At the turn of this century, Burry writes, the Nasdaq was driven by "highly profitable large caps, among which were the so-called 'Four Horsemen' of the era — Microsoft, Intel, Dell, and Cisco."

He writes that a key issue with the dot-com bubble was "catastrophically overbuilt supply and nowhere near enough demand," before adding that it's "just not so different this time, try as so many might do to make it so."

Burry calls out the "five public horsemen of today's AI boom — Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon and Oracle" along with "several adolescent startups" including Sam Altman's OpenAI.

"And once again there is a Cisco at the center of it all, with the picks and shovels for all and the expansive vision to go with it," he writes, after noting that Cisco plunged 78% during the dot-com crash. "Its name is Nvidia."

Burry finished that post with a quote from Buffett's late business partner, Charlie Munger: "If you go around popping a lot of balloons, you are not going to be the most popular fellow in the room."

The market veteran unveiled his blog on X, where he goes by "Cassandra" in reference to the priestess from Greek mythology who was cursed to speak true prophecies but never to be believed. Warren Buffett described Burry and John Paulson as "Cassandras" for predicting the mid-2000s housing market crash that ignited a global financial crisis.

Burry recently terminated Scion Asset Management's SEC registration, closing his hedge fund to outside cash. He returned to X after more than two years in late October, marking his comeback with a coded post suggesting the AI boom is a bubble and the "only winning move is not to play."

• A Swedish startup is making a low-cost interceptor to counter drone swarms.
• The single-propeller Kreuger-100XR, designed to loiter in the sky, costs just a few thousand dollars.
• Nordic Air Defense was recently selected by European authorities to compete in a contest.

Sleek, black, and sporting foldable wings, the footlong Kreuger-100XR looks almost like something you'd find in a toy store aisle.

The rocket-shaped device is what a new Swedish startup hopes will be the future of point air defense against drones.

The Kreuger-100XR, with XR standing for Extended Range, is Nordic Air Defence's debut product. It's a mostly carbon fiber interceptor that weighs about a pound and is meant to be deployed in large numbers as an inexpensive, no-frills way to hunt down and destroy uncrewed aerial systems.

European authorities are taking notice. NAD is barely two years old, but was one of four finalists selected this year to compete in a counter-drone contest held in Portugal by Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency.

Startups like NAD are one of the many ways Europe is rebalancing to face Russia's ability to mass-produce long-range attack drones. They'll compete with leading contractors that have long dominated the market, such as the French-headquartered MBDA, which is making its own eight-motor interceptors to be rolled out at scale.

The startups have an edge up their sleeve. Defense primes, though more established and better connected, typically charge a premium and are often seen as large, cumbersome organizations. NAD has about two dozen employees, while MBDA and US-headquartered Lockheed Martin, for example, have 18,000 and 121,000, respectively.

Fastest in class, NAD says

NAD says the Kreuger-100XR's propeller can push the craft to speeds above 220 mph, and that its optimal range is about two miles at an altitude of around 3,300 feet.

That distance is relatively short for typical air defense, but NAD is banking on low cost as a selling point.

The firm declined to disclose the exact price of the interceptor, saying it costs a few thousand dollars each. Traditional short-range intercept missiles, by comparison, can typically cost anywhere from $400,000 to millions of dollars each; the shoulder-fired Stinger, for example, costs $480,000.

Jens Holzapfel, NAD's director of business development, told Business Insider at the company's Stockholm office that the interceptor is designed with simplicity in mind.

A police officer should be able to easily carry several Kreuger-100XRs in a backpack and then launch them from a handheld device.

"In testing, we can either throw it like a dart or use a catapult," Holzapfel said, balancing a prototype on his fingers.

He added that only someone with an exceptionally strong arm can hurl the interceptor fast enough for an effective launch.

Making cheap counters to drone swarms

Holzapfel said the Kreuger-100XR's main cost goes toward two key components. The first is a camera that enables the interceptor to autonomously acquire its target, while the second is an optional 250-gram explosive warhead for destroying larger aircraft such as the Shahed-136 attack drone.

A cheaper version with a laser seeker, in lieu of a camera, is also planned. It will require a laser designator, whether operated by a human or an autonomous device, to track its target.

"With the XR, its wings also allow us to loiter, so we don't need a straight-shot scenario," Holzapfel said. With a radio connection, the interceptor is designed to remain airborne for at least 20 minutes before acquiring a target.

In that sense, the Kreuger-100XR can act like an autonomous drone — and that's NAD's long-term vision. A cheap, fire-and-forget interceptor could become a fundamental defense against enemy drone swarms, an anticipated threat for which militaries around the world are preparing.

"The economy of war is at such a point that it's about scalability," Holzapfel said. "If we are being attacked by a swarm of drones, we need a swarm of counter-drones."

Ukrainian drone manufacturers have also been developing their own interceptors: quadcopters capable of flying fast enough to catch the Shahed.

"But they tend to be slower or more expensive," Holzapfel said.

While many interceptor drones use four motors, which can be more costly, the Kreuger-100XR uses a single prop engine, helping NAD drive down costs and increase the device's speed, he said.

Yet it may be some time until a Kreuger-100XR counterswarm becomes a reality. Holzapfel said NAD is still working on friend-or-foe programming to prevent multiple interceptors from targeting each other.

Shaheds and recon drones

The firm is positioning the Kreuger-100XR to fight the Shahed, which Russia has been using in droves to bombard Ukrainian cities and overwhelm air defenses.

Kyiv also needs more defensive options against unjammable, small drones that use cable connections, as well as medium-range reconnaissance drones like the Orlan.

NAD plans to conduct trials in Ukraine soon, but has yet to test its product in battle. An operational altitude of 1,000 meters will also be a challenge for the Kreuger-100XR, because many Russian Shaheds and Gerbera decoys are known to cruise at 2,000 meters or above before diving down at their targets.

But Holzapfel said the Kreuger-100XR's "fastest-in-class" speed of 220 mph can still give it an edge against the Shahed-136, which typically flies at speeds around 115 mph.

"We are aiming toward the Shahed scenario for sure," he said. "And that's why we're also considering the air trail scenario, where we'll be chasing Shaheds from another airborne platform and attack them even from above."

Or the Kreuger-100XR could intercept the drones during their terminal attack, though it would be harder to accurately strike the Russian drone in that scenario because of their higher speeds.

To build an interceptor

Holzapfel said NAD is completing its prototyping phase and moving toward mass production. Although most of the Kreuger-100XR's manufacturing should be automated — particularly for the fuselage and wings — it will still require humans for some assembly tasks, such as mounting the explosive warhead.

NAD aims to establish initial manufacturing operations in Sweden, but anticipates that it may be asked to build the Kreuger-100XR on-site for foreign clients.

"If we're in Britain, they probably want to have Brits assembling these," Holzapfel said.

The startup is planning for its supply chain to have as little dependence on China as possible, sourcing off-the-shelf components from manufacturers in Europe, North America, Japan, or South Korea.

For now, NAD makes its interceptors on the ninth floor of an office building in Stockholm, where its team of 23 sits among a mix of 3D printers, prototypes, and workshop tables.

Nestled in the corner of a room is one of the startup's test-launch catapults: a few metal poles and some string.

After its founding in March 2024, NAD initially worked on another interceptor. The Kreuger-100XR's predecessor, the Kreuger-100, is a propeller-driven, wingless device designed to eliminate drones solely by hitting them in flight.

However, it's ideally suited for smaller, commercial drones, such as the hobby drones that Ukrainian and Russian troops face regularly on the front lines today.

Holzapfel said prospective clients were more interested in capabilities for fighting larger targets, such as Shaheds, and so the firm pivoted toward the XR variant during the summer.

So far, NAD has raised about $4.4 million and is looking to begin another seed round early next year, he added. Afterward, the firm hopes to recruit software engineers to train artificial intelligence that can manage a defensive swarm.

Despite pressure in the industry for startups to send their products to Ukraine as soon as possible, Holzapfel said NAD is waiting until it's sure that the Kreuger-100XR can deliver.

"Everyone is saying: 'You've got to be in Ukraine, you've got to be in Ukraine.' But we don't want to just be tourists and waste anybody's time," he said. "We weren't going to be there until we were really confident in our product."

• LingGuang, Ant Group's vibe coding app, got so popular that its function briefly crashed.
• The Chinese AI coding assistant surged to over 2 million downloads in six days, the company said.
• The app hit its first million downloads faster than OpenAI's ChatGPT and Sora.

When Chinese tech giant Ant Group released its new AI coding assistant tool last Tuesday, it didn't expect the app to break under its own popularity.

LingGuang, an AI app for vibe coding and building apps using plain-language prompts, reached over 1 million downloads in four days. By Monday, the app had crossed 2 million downloads, the company said in a press release.

On Monday, LingGuang ranked first on Apple's mainland China App Store for free utilities apps and sixth overall for free apps.

Ant Group, an affiliate company of the Chinese conglomerate Alibaba Group, said on Thursday — three days after LingGuang's debut — that the app's system buckled under heavy traffic. LingGuang's viral feature, its flash program tool, temporarily crashed after excessive usage and was soon restored.

The flash program function allows users to create personalized, interactive apps using natural language prompts in 30 seconds. The company said that users have created apps like kid activity generators and car cost savings calculators.

"LingGuang is bringing every user their own personal AI developer: someone who can code, create visuals, build programs, and turn complex ideas into simple solutions — right in your pocket," said the chief technology officer at Ant Group, He Zhengyu, in a Tuesday press release.

The company said on Monday the growth milestone is a sign that LingGuang is "a key player worth following in the quickly evolving global AI race," adding the app hit its first million downloads faster than OpenAI's ChatGPT and Sora.

Beyond its flash program function, LingGuang is pitched as a multimodal AI tool that can generate 3D models, interactive charts, animations, and other illustrations to help users understand abstract concepts. It also includes an "AGI camera" that can understand scenes in real time and help users analyze or edit images or videos on the fly.

LingGuang is available internationally on the Apple App Store, major Android app stores, and the web.

Ant Group, founded by Chinese businessman and billionaire Jack Ma, has been ramping up its AI push this year. In June, it launched its AI-powered healthcare app, AQ. A few months later, the company unveiled R1 in September, a humanoid robot positioned as a rival to Tesla's Optimus.

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's comments helped spark concerns about an AI bubble.
• Mark Cuban says he doesn't see similarities to the dot-com bubble.
• There's disagreement, even among business leaders and tech CEOs, around the existence of a bubble.

The AI boom shows no sign of slowing down. Some top business leaders are concerned that a bubble is about to burst.

In August, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gave voice to those fears about the future of AI. Since then, other CEOs, including Nvidia's Jensen Huang, have dismissed concerns of an AI bubble. Wall Street is also worried about the increasing circular nature of Big Tech's spending spree.

Here's what leading tech CEOs and business leaders are saying about what's ahead.

Sam Altman

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that the AI market is in a bubble.

"When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth," Altman recently told reporters, per The Verge.

Altman said this describes the state of play.

"Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes," he said.

Bill Gates

Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates says AI is in a bubble — just not to the extent of Danish tulips.

"The value is extremely high, just like creating the internet ended up being, in net, very valuable," Gates told CNBC in late October. "But you have a frenzy. And some of these companies will be glad they spent all this money. Some of them, you know, they'll commit to data centers whose electricity is too expensive."

Gates said that the situation reminds him of dot-com bubble when overvalued internet companies sparked a crash.

"Absolutely, there are a ton of these investments that will be dead ends," he said.

Still, the billionaire said that AI remains a major breakthrough, calling it "the biggest technical thing ever in my lifetime."

Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban, who famously sold Broadcast.com just before the dot-com bubble burst, said he doesn't see similarities to the current situation.

"There were people creating companies with just a website and going public. That's a bubble where there's no intrinsic value at all," Cuban told podcaster Lex Fridman in 2024. '"People aren't even trying to make operating cap profits, they're just trying to leverage the frothiness of the stock market, that's a bubble. You don't see that right now. "

Cuban took particular notice of the quality of AI companies going public.

"We're not seeing funky AI companies just go public," he said. "If all of a sudden we see a rush of companies who are skins on other people's models or just creating models to create models that are going public, then yeah, that's probably the start of a bubble."

Mark Zuckerberg

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said AI could become a bubble, but there will only be a crash if companies fail to keep making advancements.

"If the models keep on growing in capability year-over-year and demand keeps growing, then maybe there is no collapse," Zuckerberg told the "Access" podcast in September.

Zuckerberg said there are risks that the AI boom becomes like the dot-com bubble.

"There's definitely a possibility, at least empirically, based on past large infrastructure buildouts and how they led to bubbles, that something like that would happen here."

For Meta, Zuckerberg said the real risk is not spending enough.

"The risk, at least for a company like Meta, is probably in not being aggressive enough rather than being somewhat too aggressive," he said.

Jensen Huang

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang doesn't see a bubble.

"I don't believe we're in an AI bubble," Huang told Bloomberg TV.

Huang said that instead of overspeculation, AI is part of a transition from an old way of computing.

"We're going through a natural transition from an old computing model based on general purpose computing to accelerated computing," he said. "We also know that AI has become good enough because of reasoning capability, and research capability, its ability to think — it's now generating tokens and intelligence that is worth paying for."

Nvidia is skyrocketing amid AI-fueled hope. In late October, the chipmaker became the world's first $5 trillion market cap company.

Huang said Nvidia is happy to pay for AI for its employees, name-checking Cursor, an AI coding agent, as one of many services for which his company pays.

Sundar Pichai

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said there is some "irrationality" in the AI boom. He also cautioned that if a bubble were to burst, its blast radius would extend across the private sector.

"I think no company is going to be immune, including us," Pichai told the BBC in November.

Comparing the current moment to the Dotcom era, Pichai said that sometimes investment cycles can "overshoot."

"I expect AI to be the same," he said. "So I think it's both rational and there are elements of irrationality through a moment like this."

Jeff Bezos

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble, but not in the way everyone might think.

Bezos called the current situation an "industrial bubble." The world's third-richest person said there are similarities now, including the frenzy of investments.

"The good ideas and the bad ideas. And investors have a hard time in the middle of this excitement, distinguishing between the good ideas and the bad ideas," he said in October during a conference in Italy. "And that's also probably happening today."

Bezos said that hoopla shouldn't overshadow the reality that "AI is real" and will change society.

"The [bubbles] that are industrial are not nearly as bad," Bezos said. "It can even be good, because when the dust settles and you see who are the winners. Societies benefit from those inventions."

Daniel Pinto

JPMorgan Vice Chairman Daniel Pinto said he sees a correction coming.

"There is probably a correction there," Pinto said at a Bloomberg event in November.

Pinto said the market is pushing valuations beyond current justifications.

"In order to justify these valuations, you are considering a level of productivity that, it will happen, but it may not happen as fast as the market is pricing now," he said.

Bret Taylor

Like Altman, OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor says we're in an AI bubble.

"I think it is both true that AI will transform the economy, and I think it will, like the internet, create huge amounts of economic value in the future," Taylor told The Verge in September. "I think we're also in a bubble, and a lot of people will lose a lot of money."

Taylor, who is also CEO of Sierra, also sees some similarities to the dot-com bubble. He also said that some of the internet companies that failed in the 90s were just ahead of their time.

"Even things like Webvan, there's now, as the internet became more distributed, really healthy businesses like Instacart and DoorDash and others that were built now that the smartphone and the scale of the internet has matured," he said. "So even some of the specific ideas were actually not that bad, but maybe a little early."

Eric Schmidt

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said just because it looks like a bubble doesn't mean that it is.

"I think it's unlikely, based on my experience, that this is a bubble," Schmidt said in July during an appearance at the RAISE Summit in Paris. "It's much more likely that you're seeing a whole new industrial structure."

Schmidt said it takes solace in where the hardware and chips markets stand.

"You have these massive data centers, and Nvidia is quite happy to sell them all the chips," he said. "I've never seen a situation where hardware capacity was not taken up by software."

Pat Gelsinger

Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger says AI is in a bubble, but it won't pop for "several years."

"Are we in an AI bubble? Of course. Of course we are," Gelsinger told CNBC in October. "I mean, we're hyped. We're accelerating. We're putting enormous leverage into the system."

Gelsinger said that businesses are just beginning to reap the benefits of AI.

"As Jensen (Huang) talked about, and I agree with this, you know that businesses are yet to really start materially benefiting from it," he said. "We're displacing all of the internet and the service provider industry as we think about it today — we have a long way to go."

Joe Tsai

Alibaba cofounder Joe Tsai has voiced concerns about the scramble for data centers needed to help power the next generation of AI models.

"I start to see the beginning of some kind of bubble," Tsai told the HSBC Global Investment Summit in March, Bloomberg News reported.

Tsai said he's worried the building rush might outpace demand.

"I start to get worried when people are building data centers on spec," he said. "There are a number of people coming up, funds coming out, to raise billions or millions of capital."

Ray Dalio

Hedge fund icon Ray Dalio voiced concerns about a bubble earlier this year, when DeepSeek's rollout led analysts to rethink AI's outlook.

"Where we are in the cycle right now is very similar to where we were between 1998 or 1999," Dalio told the Financial Times in January. "There's a major new technology that certainly will change the world and be successful. But some people are confusing that with the investments being successful."

At the time, Dalio cited high stock prices and high interest rates. The good news is that Wall Street widely expects the Federal Reserve to cut rates during its September meeting.

Tom Siebel

Billionaire tech CEO Thomas Siebel said there is "absolutely" an AI bubble and that it's "huge."

"So we have this similar thing going on with generative AI that we've seen with previous technologies," Siebel told Fortune in January. "The market is way, way overvaluing."

Siebel, who leads C3.ai, singled out OpenAI in terms of overevaluations.

"If it disappeared, it wouldn't make any difference in the world," he said. "Nothing would change. I mean, nobody's life would change. No company would change. Microsoft would find something else to power Copilot. There's like 10 other products available that would do it equally as good."

Lisa Su

AMD CEO Lisa Su says the bubble talk "is completely wrong."

"For those who are talking about a 'bubble,' I think they're being too narrow in their thinking of, what is the return on investment today or over the next six months," Su told Time Magazine in 2024. "I think you have to look at this technology arc for AI over the next five years, and how does it fundamentally change everything that we do? And I really believe that AI has that potential."

Nicolai Tangen

Nicolai Tangen, who runs the world's biggest sovereign wealth fund, said if AI is a bubble, "it may not be such a bad bubble."

Speaking to the Financial Times in November, the CEO of Norway's $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund said that AI is a "pretty hot space" right now, fueled by hype and a wave of capital. As the technology marks a sweeping societal shift, traditional valuations can be difficult to determine.

Tangen said overvaluation isn't entirely negative. The sheer volume of capital rushing into AI will ultimately fund technologies that boost long-term productivity — from automation to data processing to new types of AI models.

The hard part for investors is telling real breakthroughs apart from noise in a landscape still dominated by a few powerful platform companies, he added.

• Max Altman urged tech workers to prioritize joining the fastest-growing companies.
• He criticized tech's past focus on mission over business growth.
• Today's tech companies emphasize efficiency, lean teams, and rapid growth.

Max Altman's career advice: Focus on picking the fastest-growing company.

On an episode of the "20VC" podcast published on Sunday, Altman said that tech once became too focused on prioritizing mission over "winning."

"I say, don't care about the product. Don't care about anything, just go work at the fastest growing company," the venture capitalist said. "Because winning feels great. It feels amazing."

Altman is the cofounder of Saga, a $125 million venture fund that launched last March. Its investments include defense tech startup Anduril, Reddit, and Rippling. He is the younger brother of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the older brother of Jack Altman, also a VC.

On Sunday's podcast, Max Altman said that tech lost its way in the last few years before 2020. Before becoming an investor, he worked at Microsoft, Zenefits, and Rippling.

He said that everyone in tech was making their company about their mission and "saving the world."

"We're doing on-demand dry cleaning and on-demand dog walking, but it's gonna help the world this way, and you should feel good about yourself," Altman added.

"I'm like, just go build a great business," he said. "Winning's the most fun thing here. And I think we really lost our way for a little a bit."

In the last two years, tech has largely moved in the direction Altman says he prefers. The industry has been prioritizing growing quickly and doing more with less.

Companies have cut middle-level management in favor of more streamlined teams and fewer tiers of hierarchy, which they say should lead to less bureaucracy.

Across the industry, execs are sharing memos filled with words such as "efficiency" and "scrappiness and frugality."

In April, Intel's CEO Lip-Bu Tan detailed his plan for the company's culture: more time in the office, less admin, and leaner teams.

"The most important KPI for many managers at Intel has been the size of their teams," Tan wrote, referring to key performance indicators. "Going forward, this will not be the case. The best leaders get the most done with the fewest people."

"We want to operate like the world's largest startup," Amazon's Andy Jassy wrote in a September 2024 letter. "That means having a passion for constantly inventing for customers, strong urgency (for most big opportunities, it's a race!), high ownership, fast decision-making, scrappiness and frugality, deeply-connected collaboration."

Late last month, Amazon laid off 14,000 corporate employees, citing AI's rapid advancement.