Kristina Simmons

Never a boring day. Founder and Managing Partner @overwatervc 👩‍💻 Previously @khoslaventures, @a16z @lululemon.

[Eric Topol @EricTopol]

Big progress vs cancer, folks.
The kind of event curves from randomized trials that we've not seen before for a couple of the most deadly cancers. Congrats to the oncology research community for getting these trial done. #ASCO26, @ASCO

[Kristina Simmons @ksimm]

"The partners invest in the same talent pool and converge on the same thesis. A deal makes it into the pipeline because another firm in the consensus passes it along. The flywheel spins faster, but it’s circulating the same ideas from the same people."

[Kristina Simmons @ksimm]

Worth reading this: https://t.co/Q5npPjV8gw

[Kristina Simmons @ksimm]

"According to PitchBook, 41% of all VC dollars in the first half 2025 went to ten companies."

"In 2025, the ten largest funds collected 43% of all fundraising dollars. New fund formation hit a ten-year low. In Q1 2026, 73% of all venture funding went to just five firms."

[Kristina Simmons @ksimm]

@iam_preethi I've had it twice. I went from normal thyroid to severely hyper (untraceable) in a two week span to then hypo. Went from .0001 to 14 TSH over two months. Both times it took six months to recover.

[Kristina Simmons @ksimm]

"Whether the mother sees a doctor will depend largely on whether something goes wrong" https://t.co/gJN2fWFzCY

[Kristina Simmons @ksimm]

@TaraViswanathan Love this post and agreed

[Kristina Simmons @ksimm]

I did patch allergy testing this past week and tested positive for 9/80. Those 9 are in tons products, making it very tricky. AI saved the day by looking at all my purchases and telling me which products to get rid of and what to replace it with. Such a great use case!

[Carolyn Coles-Devine @carolyncoles]

A breathtaking week & @OverwaterVC offsite at the one-and-only Sea Ranch. Big thank you to @ksimm for bringing such an inspiring group together to re-define the future of human health and wellbeing.

[Kristina Simmons @ksimm]

@billclerico Congratulations!!!

[Kristina Simmons @ksimm]

@PeterL4e Great news.

[Kristina Simmons @ksimm]

@SebastianCaliri Congrats

[Kristina Simmons @ksimm]

@patrickc I love Detroit and the Henry Ford museum.
There is good food (esp in suburbs)!

[Demis Hassabis @demishassabis]

I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health.

That work started with AlphaFold, and now at @IsomorphicLabs with the mission to reimagine drug discovery and one day solve all disease!

We are turbocharging that goal with $2.1B in new funding.

[Kristina Simmons @ksimm]

@KatieS @billclerico @NWischoff Welcome back!

[Kristina Simmons @ksimm]

🌊

[Ashlee Vance @ashleevance]

A reminder to longtime Rocket Lab investors to go ahead and subscribe to https://t.co/wfJNyzbxv3

[Kristina Simmons @ksimm]

@zalzally @ryajetha Congrats 🎉!

[John Cumbers @johncumbers]

Anthropic Says Life Sciences Is Its Biggest Bet After Code.

Eric Kauderer-Abrams started @AnthropicAI 's life sciences division ten months ago. He took on the stage at @SynBioBeta with Marc Tessier-Lavigne from @Xaira_Thera , and what caught my attention was how plainly Eric stated the following:

"The greatest opportunity to have a beneficial, scaled impact with everything that's happening in frontier AI is in the life sciences."

After coding, it's their biggest investment area. They've been training Claude on bioinformatics, chemistry, molecule design, structural biology, clinical regulatory. Their models went from mediocre in life sciences to roughly PhD level across most domains in under a year. That's a steep curve.

But what I found more telling than the benchmarks was the infrastructure they're building around it. Wet labs for basic research so their own scientists hit the walls firsthand. An acquisition of Coefficient Bio (acquired by Anthropic) to teach @claudeai how to think like a biotech program manager, not just a bench scientist. The gap between "Claude can answer a biology question" and "Claude can help you run a drug program" is enormous, and they're clearly aware of it.

Marc mentioned that 90% of drugs fail in the clinic. Two-thirds of those failures aren't bad science, but patient matching. You have a good target, a good drug, and you can't find who will respond. That's the problem both of them kept circling back to, and it's where causal AI models trained on real perturbation data might actually move the needle.

Marc said nobody's pushing a button for a development candidate anytime soon. But Anthropic went from $1B to $30B in revenue in sixteen months. That kind of resource behind this kind of focus is new. It's fun to think of what R&D can look like in the next few months!

#SynBioBeta2026 #SyntheticBiology #Biotech #AIxBio

[Kristina Simmons @ksimm]

@skupor @alexrkonrad @a16z @elizabeth @UpstartsMediaCo @ra2w Lots of great people and talent from @a16z!