• THC beverage CEOs said new hemp product rules could kill their industry.
• Jack Sherrie, CEO of Delta Beverages, said he's working with others in the industry to save THC-infused drinks.
• Industry leaders are trying to get legislation passed that would legitimize and regulate THC drinks.

CEOs are scrambling to save the THC beverage industry after a newly passed hemp crackdown threatens to wipe out a billion-dollar drink category.

Jack Sherrie, founder and CEO of Delta Beverages, said he's working with competitors and others in the industry to save their companies, many of which are small, founder-led businesses.

"It's funny, we were competing and now we're coming together," Sherrie told Business Insider. "We call it a co-opetition."

"I don't think there's anything wrong with capitalism and competition, but I think that we're definitely going to have to work together as a unit to get something passed," he added. "And we're all very well aware of that."

Delta sells seltzers infused with THC derived from hemp, which was made legal by a provision in the 2018 Farm Bill that allowed for hemp-derived products containing a limited amount of THC.

Under the funding package that reopened the government this month, Congress effectively closed that loophole. The new hemp measure, set to take effect in November 2026, bans products that contain more than 0.4 milligrams of THC per container. As a result, it would effectively ban many hemp-derived THC products currently on the market, like Delta.

"This quite literally is going to end up killing the hemp industry," Sherrie said, adding that the measure was quietly and suddenly slipped into the bill last minute, taking many in the industry by surprise.

Jake Bullock, CEO of Cann, another THC beverage company, shared similar concerns with Business Insider after the measure was passed, though he said he did not view it as a ban but instead a "one-year shot clock" for the industry to secure legislation it has long needed.

Sherrie and Bullock both said they were optimistic that new legislation could happen. The goal now is to get Congress to pass rules that will regulate the industry and ensure some hemp-derived products can continue being sold.

The CEOs said the restrictions were aimed at highly potent synthetic products, often candies, that are marketed toward kids and sold in accessible places like gas stations, rather than THC drinks, which are generally far less potent.

They also said they believe Congress is open to passing legislation that would legalize and regulate THC beverages, which have grown in popularity, especially among Gen Z, as Americans have cut back on their alcohol consumption.

Sherrie said the industry is working closely with lawmakers to propose a THC beverage bill, hopefully by the end of December.

Meanwhile, it's been a tough time for founders like Sherrie, who said sleep was nonexistent for him during the week the bill made its way through Congress and to President Donald Trump's desk.

"A lot of us are entrepreneurs. We're small businesses. We're not some giant corporation trying to take over the world," he said. "We're trying to thrive, and we're just trying to do our best."

• My husband and I took our 15 and 17-year-old kids to New York City for the first time in a decade.
• Everything on my kids' to-do lists was super touristy, but they loved every moment.
• Being total tourists was a great way to experience the city with our teens, and we'd do it again.

It'd been a decade since my kids visited New York, but given their love of theater and big cities, it wasn't surprising when they recently started asking my husband and me to take them. My family relocated to Florida from Maryland about nine years ago, so trips to NYC aren't as easy as they were when we lived up north. Still, we began researching flights and hotels, and planning a long weekend with our now 15- and 17-year-old kids in the Big Apple.

On our three-night visit to NYC, we acted like tourists, indulging in shows, carriage rides, and bus tours. Embracing our inner tourists turned out to be the perfect way to see New York with our teens for several reasons.

Staying at a hotel in the middle of Manhattan made it easy to get around.

My husband and I visited New York often before we became parents. On those trips, we'd immerse ourselves in less-touristy parts of NYC by staying in spots like Tribeca or Greenwich Village to experience the city like a local.

On this trip, we splurged on a Hilton hotel, The Quin, located right off Central Park. The hotel was a short walk from Times Square and the Broadway shows we wanted to see, and allowed us to explore the city while passing iconic spots like Carnegie Hall and Radio City Music Hall. We walked more than we took ride shares, which allowed for great chats and memory-making with our kids, not to mention my 15-year-old daughter's delight about grabbing Starbucks and walking through Central Park every morning.

Our bus tour was cheesy, but it got us everywhere we wanted to go.

There are numerous hop-on, hop-off bus tour companies in NYC, but we chose Big Bus Tours because it had a stop in Times Square, just a short walk from our hotel. Our tour included 24-hour access to plenty of stops, as well as an audio recording of information about each landmark we passed.

We spent a day shopping in SoHo, exploring Chinatown, and eating at Chelsea Market before hopping on the tour bus one final time to head back to our hotel. Touristy? Definitely. A great way to get a quick lay of the land and see lots of things in NYC? Absolutely, so we have no regrets.

We spent our evenings immersed in Broadway shows.

My teens are both involved in our local community theater scene, so they had a long list of Broadway shows they wanted to see. We planned to spend each night walking from our hotel to dinner, followed by a show, and managed to narrow our selections down to "The Great Gatsby," "Moulin Rouge," and "Chicago."

Getting dressed up for dinner and a show with our teens was incredibly fun, and worth the pricey ticket costs to invest in something that they're both interested in. Seeing shows together gave us something to chat about, and I was delighted that they even obliged me with photos of us all dressed up to go out each evening — a true win for a mom of teenagers.

Letting our kids pick our activities made for some special bonding moments.

Yes, our teens wanted to do touristy things on our trip to New York. While my husband and I prefer to explore more off-the-beaten-path things when we travel, we loved letting them plan our itinerary. Seeing the joy on their faces when they spotted the Statue of Liberty or took photos of the Brooklyn Bridge was pretty special, and it reminded my husband and me not to take these kinds of things, which we've seen many times, for granted.

What's more, following our kids' leads brought special memories to our trip. One in particular? A pricey Central Park carriage ride I took my daughter on one morning during our coffee walk. Yes, it was almost $100 for a 20-minute ride by the time I tipped, but getting that 20 minutes to hear her chatter about how much she loved the city was incredibly special.

We may return to NYC again with our teens next year.

My kids enjoyed our time in New York so much that they asked if we could make it a yearly tradition. Since we visited during the holidays, it was an easy 'yes' for my husband and me, who often prefer to give our kids experiences rather than things at Christmastime.

As we left the city, headed for the airport, I opened the notes app on my phone and asked them what they'd want to do next year in NYC. A ferry ride to the Statue of Liberty and a trip to the top of the Empire State Building were new to their list, and some returning favorites like shows on Broadway and a horse-drawn carriage ride also reappeared. If another touristy NYC trip is in our future next year, I'm OK with that. After all, it was the perfect way to spend a long weekend bonding with our kids.

• Salesforce's CEO says he's ditching ChatGPT for Google's Gemini 3, calling the leap "insane."
• Tech leaders, including Sam Altman and Andrej Karpathy, have praised Gemini 3's early performance.
• Gemini 3's launch cements Google's push to reclaim the AI crown from OpenAI.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says he's ditching OpenAI's ChatGPT for Google's newest AI model, Gemini 3 — calling it an "insane" leap forward in reasoning, speed, and multimodal capabilities.

"Holy shit," Benioff wrote on X on Sunday. "I've used ChatGPT every day for 3 years. Just spent 2 hours on Gemini 3. I'm not going back. The leap is insane — reasoning, speed, images, video… everything is sharper and faster. It feels like the world just changed, again."

Benioff's reaction quickly went viral, racking up more than one million views as of early Monday morning. It adds to a growing chorus of executives praising Google's latest AI release.

Executives are lining up behind Gemini 3

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, Google's biggest rival in the AI race, congratulated the company on Gemini 3's launch, posting on X last week: "Looks like a great model."

Former Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy said on X he had a "positive early impression" of Gemini 3, calling it "very solid daily driver potential" and "clearly a tier 1 LLM."

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison also weighed in, posting on X that Gemini 3 built an "interactive web page summarizing 10 breakthroughs in genetics," which he called "pretty cool."

Google and its DeepMind division unveiled Gemini 3 last week, describing it in a blog post as their "most powerful agentic and vibe coding model yet," capable of generating and understanding text, images, video, and code with tighter integration across the Google ecosystem.

The AI arms race is heating up

Benioff's endorsement is striking, given Salesforce's deep partnerships across the AI landscape — including those with OpenAI and Anthropic — and underscores how rapidly preferences among top tech leaders are shifting as models get faster and better.

Google's Gemini 3 arrives amid intensifying competition from OpenAI's ChatGPT 4.5 Turbo and 5, as well as Anthropic's Claude 3.5, each pushing boundaries in reasoning and tool use.

• Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke joins Apiiro as a strategic advisor.
• Apiiro helps organizations monitor and secure AI-generated software code and codebases.
• Dohmke aims to enhance protections as AI coding tools increase cybersecurity risks for companies.

GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke stepped down a few months ago. He's getting back into the arena now.

Dohmke was just tapped as a strategic advisor to Apiiro, a startup that helps organizations monitor the security of their apps and codebases.

He'll focus on helping Apiiro develop new protections for AI-generated software code.

As more AI coding tools churn out code, there's concern that this could make codebases more vulnerable to hacks and other cybersecurity risks.

Dohmke said developers now often use multiple AI coding agents, and these tools don't necessarily know all the policies, rules, and safeguards that their employers have set up to ensure their codebases and broader technology offerings are secure.

Apiiro's technology connects with companies' code-management systems, providing this crucial context for AI code generation, he said.

"That's the important part," Dohmke added, adding that Apiiro can spot and automatically fix such issues in code, helping developers comply with company guidelines, while not piling on more work for them to do.

Apiiro has raised more than $100 million from investors, including General Catalyst, Greylock, and Kleiner Perkins. CEO Idan Plotnik has launched and sold other startups in the past and has served as a cybersecurity executive at Microsoft.

Dohmke also comes from Microsoft, which owns GitHub. He said he met Plotnik about three years ago and was taken by the CEO's energy and Apiiro's mission.

Of course, the former head of GitHub has a lot of choices for what to do next. And while Dohmke gets a portion of Apiiro for his advisory services, he said he's more interested in what Apiiro is building.

As more employees use AI to develop digital products and prototypes, the startup's technology should become even more useful, he said.

Sign up for BI's Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.

• Technologists who specialize in AI are now Wall Street's most in-demand workers.
• The scramble is fueling a talent war with Big Tech and other sectors.
• Recruiters explain what banks and asset managers are offering to lure them.

The hottest job on Wall Street right now isn't a trader or dealmaker. It belongs to the human minds who specialize in building the digital ones.

Bank chiefs have been touting how adopting artificial intelligence at scale will help employees work smarter and cut costs, and they're putting serious money behind those AI ambitions. Goldman Sachs' CEO David Solomon said in October that he wished the firm's $6 billion annual tech budget was even higher, while Bank of America dedicated $4 billion this year to "new technology initiatives," according to the company.

A chunk of that investment is directed at building out battalions of tech professionals to realize those strategies. However, the demand for that talent is driving salaries for technologists who specialize in AI — from rank-and-file engineers to executive and C-suite tech strategists — to soar at banks, according to insiders.

"There's certainly not enough people" to keep pace with hiring demand, said recruiter Ryan Bulkoski, the global head of the AI, data, and analytics practice at the search firm Heidrick & Struggles.

Recruiters and executives across financial services companies told Business Insider the result is a full-blown talent war pitting Wall Street banks against hedge funds, private asset managers, and Silicon Valley startups.

The senior-level or C-suite AI leader who can steer corporate strategy "is the hottest job in the market" right now, forcing financial services firms to cough up "stretch offers," Chris Connors, a principal at the compensation consultancy Johnson Associates, told Business Insider.

"If you are a high-caliber talent, you are more desirable than virtually every other role in the market," Connors added, noting that some firms have extended special, non-standard awards to lure top-tier talent or prevent them from leaving. Competition across the industry is fierce, as hedge funds and other asset managers have even issued incremental equity or long-term awards, Connors said — they often range from $500,000 to $1 million, typically vesting across three to four years. Some firms have offered "significant upfront sign-on grants," often in excess of $200,000, delivered off the bat as cash or equity, he said.

For banks, especially, it has created a conundrum — how to extend big-ticket offers while adhering to their often rigid, standardized compensation bands. Hiring managers are forking over "some uncomfortable hiring packages" which are vaulting recipients into "a completely different stratosphere," Bulkoski explained, noting that top compensation packages for senior-level AI leaders are reaching the high seven- and even eight-figure range.

"Nobody's leaving for less than 30%" pay increases if they're coming from companies where they're already "heads-down and doing well," he said. "No one's going to move for the historical 10, 15, or even 20% bump in compensation."

Making money moves

AI hiring in the financial services industry grew in 2025 to 10 times its level at the start of January 2022, according to an analysis by workforce data provider Revelio Labs. To assemble the data, Revelio examined finance job postings for roles like "AI engineer," "machine learning engineer," and "computer vision engineer," among others.

Six of the largest US banks — including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley — have collectively posted more than 2,000 AI roles in the past 12 months, Revelio's data showed.

That surging demand for AI talent is driving paychecks higher.

The average salary for AI professionals in finance, excluding C-suite roles, had risen to about $180,000 from $142,000 in 2020. That increase of more than 25% puts them on par with what conventional tech firms tend to pay for these roles, Revelio said.

JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley declined to comment, while others did not respond to requests for comment.

"What we have seen with banks over the past few years is they've had to really reframe and reimagine those comp ranges, especially for a lot of this type of talent," Ben Hodzic, head of North America at the recruiting firm Selby Jennings, told Business Insider. That's especially true as they're coming up against multistrategy hedge funds and high-frequency systematic trading firms that are "paying whatever they need to pay to get people," he said.

Seat at the table

But money alone isn't enough, insiders said. These technologists also want something else: power.

Insiders said the AI race has elevated the voices of technology chiefs at banks and asset managers, giving them a perch at powerful tables that steer firms' overall strategy. Bulkoski said that, for prospective AI chiefs, wielding greater levels of influence in the boardroom alongside other C-suite leaders is an appealing prospect unto itself. "It could trump another number on the sheet," he said.

The nature of the work is attracting a broad swathe of professionals eager to exploit the breach. "Go on LinkedIn and look at the number of people who just changed their title from data scientist to AI scientist," Bulkoski said. "It's kind of unbelievable."

Candidates for senior-level roles are skewing younger, he continued. Some AI-savvy talent in their early- to mid-20s are pulling high-six to seven-figure offers, he said. To suss out who is a fit and who isn't, Bulkoski said his team assesses "whether they have a real track record" of constructing original AI or machine learning products at scale, and if they can channel that knowledge into creating commercial or operational value.

"Most are in the early phases of developing executive maturity," he said, "but the best of them can already influence senior leaders by grounding every conversation in architecture, data, and measurable impact."

The ladder up

With access to the board and stepped-up influence and responsibility, some Wall Street insiders are betting they can offer something Big Tech companies generally can't: a steadier, more clearly defined climb up the professional ranks.

With tech firms consolidating and fears of an AI bubble mounting, recruiters say some technologists are increasingly drawn to the stability and hierarchy that the financial services industry is known for.

"There's been a lot less volatility with jobs in the finance industry compared to the tech industry," said Selby Jennings' Hodzic, adding that finance offers a more well-worn, clearly defined pathway. He said Wall Street had been insulated from the kind of mass layoffs that have roiled Big Tech. Amazon, for instance, cut about 14,000 corporate jobs in 2025.

Recruiters say the flames fanning the talent war aren't dissipating anytime soon, and that the next phase of the hiring race is already underway.

"In 2025, it's almost like Gen AI is in the past," Bulkoski said. "We're actually now working on searches that have 'agentic AI' in the title."

• Bobbi Brown said she believes that too many managerial layers in a company are 'dumb.'
• In WSJ's CMO Council Summit, she rejected the concept of layers and excess consultants.
• Jones Road Beauty reflects Brown's focus on simplicity, efficiency, and founder-led decision-making.

For Bobbi Brown, one of the perks of starting over after leaving her namesake brand was being "freed" from the constraints of a large corporation.

The beauty founder said she learned a valuable lesson from that experience: "Layers are dumb."

"The most important thing is I learned what not to do," Brown said at The Wall Street Journal's CMO Council Summit on Wednesday. "Not to waste time, energy, money."

When Brown launched her namesake brand in 1991, she was 34 years old and handled every aspect of the company.

"I used to interview every single person in the beginning. Every single person," Brown said on a recent "Master of Scale" podcast episode discussing the release of her recent memoir, "Still Bobbi."

In the years after she sold her company to Estée Lauder and signed a 25-year non-compete with the beauty conglomerate, that dynamic started to change, and toward the end of her time at the company, the brand became "very process-oriented." Brown described becoming increasingly excluded from hiring decisions as the company expanded.

Estée Lauder did not reply to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Consultants and KPIs

Part of Brown's lesson to not waste resources and energy is to "not hire a lot of consultants," she said at the WSJ CMO Council Summit.

When she founded her new company, Jones Road Beauty, she said she stripped away unnecessary layers. The founder said she's "narrow-minded with what needs to get done," but loves hearing others' opinions.

She also said she doesn't understand why traditional corporate measures of metrics, like key performance indicators, or KPIs, are needed to assess performance.

"You either did a good job and sales are good, or you did a bad job," Brown said.

Brown isn't the only leader who has expressed frustrations with corporate bureaucracy in recent years. After a spike in hiring during the pandemic, many Big Tech companies have spent the last few years cutting back staffing, trimming middle management, and flattening organizational layers.

Brown said at the WSJ CMO Council Summit that she's maintained the same entrepreneurial ethos she had as an early founder and that she's still the "same Bobbi" who was cold-calling from the Yellow Pages.

"I love being scrappy," she said.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jenny Wood, a 45-year-old former Google executive who lives in Boulder, Colorado. She left Google in August 2024 and is now a keynote speaker, coach, and author. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

It seemed preposterous for me to ever think about leaving Google.

I started there in November 2006, when there were only around 10,000 employees, and became an executive — the director of American media relations — in 2022.

Google's amazing; I bleed Google colors. I loved the impact I was having, the future of opportunities I saw for myself, and the feedback I was getting as a leader. I'm also the breadwinner for my family.

I'd always thought I'd be at Google for another 15 years and would retire there.

I realized I couldn't sustain my life anymore

The moment that started the agony was when I was driving my son, who was 7 at the time, home from choir rehearsal in the dark, a 45-minute drive on winding roads.

Because of everything on my plate at the time — my role at Google, leading the Own Your Career program, navigating my book opportunities, and being a wife and mom — I was suffering from so much anxiety that it kept me up at night, feeling like I was letting everybody down and not doing anything well.

Mostly, I was incredibly sleep-deprived.

As I was driving, I was like, Oh my gosh. Did my eyes just flutter closed? I didn't actually fall asleep at the wheel, but it was a terrifying moment.

During my next session with my executive coach, I told her I couldn't sustain this anymore. I had taken on so many things in the name of success. She said, "Jenny, circumstances change."

Her words stopped me in my tracks and opened me up to the possibility of leaving — leaving well and quitting thoughtfully.

Thus ensued 18 months of back-and-forth about whether I should stay or go.

I used a spreadsheet to help me weigh the risks

I'm a left-brain thinker and approach the world in a very analytical way, so it was hard to feel in my gut that it was time to leave.

One thing that really helped was a spreadsheet I made, weighing actual risk against perceived risk. I broke it down into four components: physical risk, cognitive risk, emotional risk, and financial risk.

Physical risk included things like not sleeping at night, pain, and weight loss (which I gave a 1). Cognitive risk was mental stress, distraction, and mental drain (a 2). Emotional risk included potential for rejection, loss of connection with loved ones, negative self-talk, and fear (a 2). And the financial risk was things like paying my future mortgage statement and future earnings potential (a 2).

Breaking things down helped me get out of a catastrophizing mindset of thinking, This is a ridiculous idea, and made me think much more practically about how this might be possible.

I had to change my mindset to escape the golden handcuffs

The golden handcuffs are very real.

It wasn't just my salary, bonus, and equity; it was all of that future income as well. I would log in to my Google stock portfolio system — which tells you what you've earned and what you'll earn when your stock vests — and my palms would sweat. It was really hard to walk away from that number.

But ultimately, if you're in an executive role at any Fortune 500 company, you're probably making more than you need to live on. I guess it depends on your lifestyle; I live pretty frugally. Even so, I still couldn't imagine my income and net assets not continuing to go up and to the right every single year until I retired.

That was a mindset I had to move past.

It took my husband and me having seven conversations with our financial advisor — which ended up being more like therapy — for me to feel comfortable and confident that I could do this.

My advice on quitting well

I ended up leaving Google in August 2024. I cried after I turned in my badge and computer and as I drove away — happy, sad, and bittersweet tears. It was 18 years of my life!

When I came home, my husband and kids had written all these phrases that I'd said before through my leadership and coaching work, and arranged them in a heart shape on the window in the kitchen.

The heart is still up, 14 months later.

Quitting Google has been a massive change. I don't want to make it sound like it was easy; it was the scariest and hardest thing I've ever gone through in my professional life.

But I'd say I quit extraordinarily well. Here's my advice for others.

1. Mind your truths and tales

A truth is a verifiable fact, while a tale is a story you create to make sense around the facts. We often tell ourselves negative tales, and they don't serve us well because we believe what we think.

To get past my fears, I had to separate the truths from the tales, and then rewrite those tales to be more empowering.

For example:

Tale: I will lose my entire identity if I leave Google.

Truth: I'll no longer be employed by Google.

A more empowering tale: Part of the reason I'm leaving is because I want to have a huge book launch and possibly be a bestselling author. That's an incredible new identity to adopt!

Or, tale: We will run out of money and have to move to a smaller house, away from the gorgeous hiking trails that are behind our current house.

Truth: I will not get a paycheck with the Google logo on it every two weeks.

A more empowering tale: I've worked really hard to put myself in the best financial position possible to make this a reality.

One tale I told myself was that my kids would never forgive me for leaving Google because they love the secret game room, the climbing wall, and the free snacks and candy — Google's a really cool place for a parent to work. But I know they're really proud of what I'm doing.

What matters more to them is that now I'm done with work every day at 2:40 p.m., I drop them off and pick them up from school almost every day, and they're probably going to start traveling to places like Disney World and Vegas with me for keynotes now.

There's no question this was the right decision for my family.

2. Prioritize your dynamic dozen

Before I quit, I made a spreadsheet on my personal computer of people I wanted to stay in touch with and their email addresses. I was also posting on LinkedIn frequently and building an audience.

I set up what I call the "dynamic dozen" — 12 people you want to meet with in the next 12 weeks. This is great if you're trying to switch roles within your company, if you're looking for a new job, and also if you want to quit. It could be 12 people in 12 weeks, or 30 people in 30 days.

Mine was probably closer to around 60 people in 60 days, because I wanted to leverage all of the relationships I had: people who might want to bring me as a keynote speaker in the future, or people who might want to buy a hundred bulk copies of my book two years from then.

When you leave a company, your network always remains, so double down on that before you peace out. Have honest, intentional conversations, put time on someone's calendar, and reach out to people, even if it's been years since you had a working relationship.

I had to push past the fear that no one at Google would want to work with me once I was on the outside, that I'd be irrelevant. My work is a lot about how to thrive in a corporate environment, so I wondered, If I'm no longer in one, will any of my content still be valid?

Now, my number one client is Google. The vast majority of my coaching clients are Google employees, and a huge chunk of my speaking revenue is from Google speaking engagements or consulting.

3. Move, then map

Once, I was hiking in Montana with two friends, and the trail diverged into two paths. I'm always trying to optimize, so I started peppering the park ranger with all of these questions: "What is the perfect path? Which one will be more cardio? Which one is a lake view and which is a mountain view? Which trail is muddy?"

And from 50 feet ahead, my friend yelled, "Jenny, it's all beautiful! Just start walking!"

I'm always trying to map out everything perfectly — how much income I'd make, how quickly I could build a business, what I'd be if not a Googler.

You can't do that. Fear adds friction, which slows you down without actually minimizing risk.

Trying to map every little possible component also takes the joy out of the process. Action makes progress; thinking provides clarity. When you move and then map —or at least move and map in tandem — you're going to be set up for so much more success.

If you quit your job for an unconventional path and want to share your story, please reach out to this reporter at janezhang@businessinsider.com.

• Brian Zhan is a young VC who made early bets on Skild AI, Dyna Robotics, Periodic Labs, and Reflection AI.
• Zhan will be employing an unusually bold strategy of writing $30 million checks to seed-stage companies.
• Zhan believes VC is undergoing a transformation that requires firms to pounce with big checks very early.

At just 29, Brian Zhan, who practices what he describes as "nerdy investing," has already made early bets on buzzy AI companies now valued in the billions.

After quietly leaving Silicon Valley VC firm CRV this summer, Zhan recently joined Striker Venture Partners, where he and veteran investor Max Gazor plan to upend traditional VC playbooks with a $165 million fund that aims to make massive seed bets on the next generation of AI startups.

"We're only investing in 10 companies per fund, and we're going to show up with checks up to $30 million," Zhan said. "That takes conviction."

$30 million is what companies typically raise in a later funding round once they have achieved product-market fit, but Zhan believes VC is undergoing a radical transformation that requires firms to pounce with big checks when an early kernel of an idea presents itself.

"Seed-stage investing is moving earlier and earlier," he said. "Seed rounds today are often just 22-year-old founders with a great idea."

Zhan, who studied computer science at Northwestern University and started his career writing code at Facebook, is emblematic of a shift taking place in venture, where investors switch firms more often and technical backgrounds are prized above MBAs because many of the most promising new startups have few business metrics to evaluate.

"It was on the Facebook data team where I saw a pattern that really stuck with me," he said. "The best technical minds at the company were founding startups and then struggling to raise meaningful capital, despite having résumés that Silicon Valley normally drools over."

He started angel investing in his spare time, writing small checks into projects led by former Facebook engineers. At CRV, Zhan transitioned to a full-time VC role, making early bets on Skild AI, Dyna Robotics, and Periodic Labs.

"Today, these companies are some of the best-known companies in AI, but back at the seed round, a lot of VCs just didn't really know who these founders were," Zhan said.

His biggest win so far is the model startup Reflection AI, which he views as proof that VCs should not be afraid to pay up in seed rounds.

Zhan co-led Reflection AI's seed round just last year at a $200 million valuation, a very expensive price that many other VCs passed up. Last month, the company raised $2 billion at a valuation of $8 billion.

"Founders want someone who can speak their language," said Misha Laskin, CEO and cofounder of Reflection AI. "Brian is rare in that he's actually done the work, is incredibly well connected, and is insightful about what's happening at the frontier."

Excited about AI for science

Zhan grew up in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Palo Alto. His older sister is Stephanie Zhan, a general partner at Sequoia Capital, who was also an early backer of Reflection AI and Skild AI.

"I would say we have very similar tastes, and sometimes we land on the same companies," Brian Zhan said.

Asked if they will be discussing deals around the Thanksgiving table, he said: "No, we keep work separate."

While many VCs spend their days in coffee shops meeting as many founders as possible, Zhan finds it more useful to devote hours a day to reading the latest AI research curated by his own custom AI assistant.

He says he was drawn to reunite with Gazor, an MIT Ph.D. dropout who has appeared four times on the Forbes Midas list, because of their similar intellectual style.

"We spend all morning reading papers and trying to identify the trends and who has the most exciting ideas," Zhan said. "We take very few meetings every day. We just spend more time figuring out what the frontier is, and when we reach out to founders, we have already made up our mind to go back to them."

Gazor, who is probably best known for his early investment in Airtable, helped recruit Zhan to CRV in 2023 and wanted to work with him again.

"I saw him become one of the most trusted advisors to some of the most high-profile AI founders, and I was really in awe of how he related to them," Gazor said. "He's got a fantastic trajectory ahead of him."

Zhan says he is most excited about founders who are harnessing the power of AI for science, such as William Fedus, a former OpenAI researcher who recently cofounded Periodic Labs to automate scientific discovery.

"Imagine if we could use AI to dramatically shorten drug discovery timelines?" Zhan said. "I think that AI for science will become as big a category as AI for robotics is today."

• Amazon Web Services lost some AI customers to competitors due to capacity issues.
• Some clients shifted projects after AWS Bedrock didn't meet capacity demand this summer.
• AWS Bedrock faces rising competition as cloud and AI rivals offer better performance.

This summer, Amazon's cloud business struggled to keep pace with surging AI demand and missed out on real revenue for its flagship AI product.

Amazon Web Services's Bedrock service sits at the center of the company's AI push. It lets developers tap into powerful models, including Anthropic's Claude and Meta's Llama.

But over the summer, Bedrock hit "critical capacity constraints" that drove some customers to rival services, such as Google's cloud service, according to an internal July document obtained by Business Insider.

The shortages led to tens of millions of dollars in lost or delayed revenue. Epic Games shifted a $10 million Fortnite project to Google Cloud after AWS failed to provide enough quota for Bedrock, according to the document. (Quota limits control how much intelligence customers can access via AI cloud services).

Oil trader Vitol weighed moving some projects away from AWS, a decision that risked a $3.5 million revenue hit amid "prolonged quota approvals," the document also warned. Other customers, including Atlassian and GovTech Singapore, were waiting on quota increases this summer, delaying at least $52.6 million in projected sales, the document also disclosed.

Bedrock was "experiencing critical capacity constraints that are threatening customer adoption and potentially causing substantial revenue loss across multiple industries," the July document stated.

The fallout underscores the financial toll of AWS's capacity crunch, and it explains why the biggest cloud companies are rushing to build as many AI data centers as possible right now. High demand is a good thing, but if you can't satisfy this and customers go to rivals, that's a frustrating problem.

Indeed, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has repeatedly stressed the need to ramp up cloud infrastructure, particularly AI chips and data center power. It's unclear whether the company has fully resolved these issues. Three current and former employees said the capacity crunch remained one of AWS's top concerns through September.

An Amazon spokesperson said Bedrock is "experiencing rapid growth" and AWS is adding capacity to meet that demand. Reviewing customer feedback is a core part of Amazon's culture, which helps the company improve its products and services, the spokesperson added.

"At Amazon, we're vocally self-critical because that's how we drive continuous improvement and deliver better results for customers," the spokesperson said in a statement. "This internal candor is a feature of our culture, not a flaw. We're grateful for all customer feedback—including challenges they encounter—because it helps us make Bedrock even better, and that's exactly how you build a scalable, sustainable business that serves customers well over the long term."

A Google spokesperson declined to comment. Representatives for Anthropic and Epic Games didn't respond to requests for comment.

'Accelerating capacity'

Expanding data center capacity, as with other cloud providers, is one of AWS's top priorities.

During an October earnings call, Jassy said AWS had been "focused on accelerating capacity the last several months," adding more than 3.8 gigawatts of power over the past year, more than any other cloud provider. AWS has doubled its power capacity since 2022 and plans to double it again by 2027, he noted.

Jassy added that Amazon will remain "very aggressive" in scaling up capacity to meet booming demand, noting that AWS can monetize new infrastructure almost immediately. Bedrock, he said, is already showing potential to grow as large as EC2, one of AWS's most successful cloud products and a key profit engine.

Part of Bedrock's shortages may stem from prioritizing large clients. In October, Jassy said most of Bedrock's workloads run on AWS's in-house AI chip, Trainium, but that usage so far has come mainly from "a small number of very large customers." He added that more mid-sized companies are expected to adopt the next-generation Trainium in the coming months.

Amazon is expected to reveal more details about Bedrock and its broader cloud strategy during its annual re:Invent conference in early December.

'Urgent need'

The July AWS document said the capacity crunch was hitting customers across industries, including finance, gaming, and tech. Companies such as HelloFresh, Zalando, and Ryanair were among those affected.

At the same time, "slow capacity approval and denial of spiky workload requests" prevented firms like Stripe, Robinhood, and Vanguard from moving AI workloads from Anthropic to Bedrock, the document noted.

"These constraints are forcing customers to explore alternative providers like GCP, OpenAI, and Anthropic, signaling an urgent need for AWS to address its Bedrock service quota and performance challenges to maintain competitive positioning in the rapidly evolving GenAI market," the document stated.

Quota limits in Bedrock are based on how many AI tokens you can process in a minute, or the number of API calls you can make in a given time period. (Tokens are how AI models break queries down into digestible data chunks. Industry pricing is based on how many tokens are processed. APIs are application programming interfaces, a common way applications share data).

In recent weeks, investors have grown uneasy over the tech industry's massive AI spending, with fears of a potential bubble weighing on markets.

Amazon's AI capacity issues are a double-edge sword here. On one hand, these challenges suggest customer demand is still very strong. On the other, it's another reason for big tech companies to keep spending heavily, potentially fueling the AI bubble even more.

Amazon has said it plans to pour $125 billion into capital expenditures this year, and even more in 2026. AWS revenue climbed to $33 billion last quarter, up 20% year over year, marking its fastest growth since 2022.

Performance issues

It wasn't just capacity woes driving customer workloads away from Bedrock. Latency and missing features also played a major role.

Customers using Anthropic's Claude models through Bedrock opted to switch to Anthropic's own platform or Google Cloud because of "ongoing capacity, latency, and feature parity issues," according to the July AWS document. Companies such as Figma, Intercom, and Wealthsimple were among those migrating their workloads "due to one or several of these challenges."

The UK's Government Digital Service considered a move to Microsoft's cloud because Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet model ran slower on Bedrock, the document added.

Thomson Reuters also chose Google Cloud over Bedrock for its CoCounsel AI product after finding AWS's service was 15% to 30% slower and lacked key government compliance certifications, the document showed. In May, executives raised these concerns with AWS leadership, including CEO Matt Garman and compute VP Dave Brown, leading both companies to agree to monthly review meetings.

Joel Hron, CTO of Thomson Reuters, told Business Insider that the company recently moved "one component of an AI workload to Google Cloud to prioritize latency." He added that Thomson Reuters still runs substantial workloads on AWS and Anthropic as part of its multi-model, multi-cloud strategy.

'Increasing competition' from Google

The July AWS document also noted that Bedrock was losing ground to Google's Gemini models, which boast five to six times larger quota limits and, in many cases, better performance.

When comparing accessing Claude via Bedrock against Gemini Pro, the internal report said the Google model outperformed "across multiple benchmarks." The document also noted that Gemini Flash, a smaller, cheaper Google model, "delivers comparable quality at a fraction of the cost." (And this was before Google's Gemini 3 launch, which improved AI performance further for the internet giant).

Some startups jumped ship because of this. Financial startup TainAI shifted 40% of its Claude workloads from Bedrock to Gemini Flash, saving $85,000 a day, while Hotel Planner was planning to move to Google Cloud or OpenAI, the document noted.

The broader concern, according to the document, is that AWS lacked a cohesive product vision for AI inference, the main space in which Bedrock competes. Rivals such as Databricks, FireworksAI, and Nvidia's Dynamo were quickly pulling ahead, it noted.

Without a clear strategy or compelling long-term vision, AWS risked missing out on one of the most lucrative opportunities in the AI market, it warned.

"We are still missing an inspiring long-term vision and a holistic strategy," the document said.

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• 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.