General Catalyst has backed Anthropic, Stripe, and Airbnb. It has also bought a hospital system.

That combination is exactly why Unity Stoakes wanted Holly Maloney, Managing Director at General Catalyst, in front of the StartUp Health community. Maloney leads GC's health assurance investing practice, a portfolio that runs from seed-stage founders to the full acquisition of Summa Health in Akron, Ohio – a comprehensive system with more than 8,000 employees, millions of patients, and its own insurance plan. For members who logged in live, the hour was less a pitch on GC's track record than a working session on how the firm actually thinks, with Maloney fielding questions in real time from founders in the room.

Nearly nine years into her time at GC, Maloney walked through a decision the firm made six to seven years ago: build a leadership position in healthcare by partnering deeply with incumbents rather than building around them. That bet has produced more than 27 health system partnerships, representing close to 15 percent of care delivery in the United States, all aimed at helping systems run better so they can put more resources toward care itself.

Summa Health, acquired through GC's operating subsidiary HATCo, takes that thesis a step further. It lets GC deploy its transformation stack from the inside and learn, at the scale of a real health system, what actually works. Maloney was candid that it's early innings – the goal is to package those learnings into tiered, multi-year commitments other systems can adopt.

Maloney's read on AI in healthcare: the center of gravity is moving. A few years ago, most of the traction was administrative – scribing, billing cycle optimization. Now it's showing up at the point of care, with companies she cited, like Hippocratic AI, building an abundant healthcare workforce that drives patient engagement at scale. She flagged voice models as moving faster than almost anyone expected, and pointed to drug discovery and diagnostics as areas changing "week to week."

That shift was very much on the minds of the founders in the room. One question pressed Maloney on who wins the race for the consumer side of healthcare as human-in-the-loop AI matures. Another asked her to weigh in on moving healthcare from episodic to continuous. Maloney's answer to that second question doubled as one of the session's clearest takeaways: continuous care isn't really a technology problem anymore. It's a plumbing problem – shared infrastructure, interoperable data, and patient identifiers that travel across systems are still missing at the scale needed to unlock a true longitudinal picture of health.

Asked what GC looks for at the earliest stages – still the firm's core, despite its reach across every stage of growth – Maloney kept it to fundamentals: founders who can say clearly who they are, why they're uniquely positioned to solve the problem in front of them, and why that problem matters inside a bigger thesis. She named AI and drug discovery, the intersection of healthcare and hardware, robotics, aging, and health at home as areas GC is actively watching for the next wave beyond administrative automation. Her advice for getting in front of the firm: a warm introduction that gets the founder and the thesis across succinctly beats a cold pitch every time.

Maloney closed with a framing she called seismic, on par with COVID in the scale of recalibration it demands: is it better to make an existing platform AI-native, or to start over? Retrofitting a legacy system, she argued, can cost more in time and money than rebuilding – and with tools now capable of generating much of that code, starting fresh is more viable than it's ever been. Her confidence in the answer comes back to the market itself: healthcare is the largest non-cyclical sector in the U.S. economy, which means platforms built thoughtfully today have years to compound.

The video and podcast versions of this conversation will carry Maloney's exchange with Stoakes. What they won't carry is the audience participation – the back-and-forth with founders in the room, with questions that came in faster than Stoakes could work through them live. That part only exists in the full recording, available to StartUp Health members alongside the connections that happened after the chat ended.

It's also a preview of what's ahead. StartUp Health members get access to fireside chats and expert AMAs like this one as they happen, with the chance to bring their own questions to investors and health system leaders shaping where the industry goes next.

🚀 Become a StartUp Health member to catch the next live conversation – and ask your own questions.