Vijay Pande

Vijay Pande is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he leads the firm’s investments in companies at the cross section of biology and computer science including areas such as the application of computation, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence broadly into Biology and Healthcare as well as the application of novel transformative scientific advances.

Previously, Vijay was the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Structural Biology and of Computer Science at Stanford University. He led a team of researchers pioneering computational methods and their application to medicine and biology, resulting in over 200 publications, two patents and two novel drug treatments. Concurrently, he was the director of the Biophysics program at Stanford, where he led a team of more than 50 Stanford faculty members and propelled the program to the top in the country.

As an entrepreneur at the convergence of biology and computer science, Vijay is the founder of the Folding@Home Distributed Computing Project for disease research that pushes the boundaries of the development and application of computer science techniques (such as distributed systems, machine learning, and exotic computer architectures) into biology and medicine, in both fundamental research as well as the development of new therapeutics. Also during his time at Stanford, Vijay co-founded Globavir Biosciences, where he translated his research advances at Stanford and Folding@Home into a successful startup, discovering cures for Dengue Fever and Ebola. In his teens, he was the first employee at video game startup Naughty Dog Software, maker of Crash Bandicoot.

Vijay received a BA in Physics from Princeton University and a PhD in Physics from MIT. He was awarded the DeLano Prize in Computation, Guinness World Record for Folding@Home, ACS Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award, and MIT TR100.

He serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: Apeel, Freenome, Omada Health, Patient Ping, and Rigetti Computing. He also leads the firm’s investments in Benchling, Cardiogram, SolveBio, TL Biolabs, TwoXAR, Q.bio, and uBiome.