Treehub, a new Stanford University-adjacent residency program backed by the AI Health Fund, launched today, with billionaire investor Tim Draper and 23andMe Holding Co. founder Anne Wojcicki among the high-profile names attached to an effort to scout early-stage artificial intelligence and healthcare founders emerging from academic labs.

Based in Los Altos, California, just off Stanford University’s campus, Treehub is being pitched as a boutique residency built to bridge the gap between academic breakthrough and fundable company, a stage where scientist-founders have historically struggled to secure capital or operational support.

The AI Health Fund, Treehub’s venture arm, writes the first check into every company that comes through the program and, in many cases, commits capital before a company has been formally incorporated.

Treehub combines elements of a venture studio, an incubator and a traditional venture fund. Founders in the program are offered access to proprietary medical data, curated programming with payers, buyers and investors and mentorship from operators who have built and exited healthcare and technology startups.

The program targets three investment domains: precision outcomes, including genomic risk stratification and consumer-driven care; care efficiency, including ambient intelligence and automated logistics; and frontier science, including robotic surgery and digital twin simulations.

“The next great healthcare company probably isn’t being built in a garage,” said Mary Minno, founding partner at Treehub and a former product management executive at Google LLC. “It’s being built in a lab by a scientist who has never had a venture partner willing to back them at the earliest stage. Treehub bridges that gap.”

The involvement of Wojcicki is notable given the colorful history of 23andMe, the consumer genomics company she co-founded in 2006.

23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2025 after a sustained decline in its stock and a major 2023 data breach that exposed information on roughly 7 million customers. Wojcicki ultimately reacquired the company through her nonprofit TTAM Research Institute later that year. She joins Treehub as an operating partner.

Draper, founder of Draper Associates and an early investor in Tesla Inc., Skype and Coinbase Global Inc., is named as a backer of the program, though the size of his commitment was not disclosed.

The rest of Treehub’s leadership spans academia and finance. Dr. Roxana Daneshjou, an assistant professor of biomedical data science and dermatology at Stanford Medicine and an adviser to OpenEvidence Inc. and Pear VC, joins Treehub alongside Dr. Alexander Ioannidis, a Stanford assistant professor and founder of Galatea Bio Inc. They are joined by Derek Minno, president of Point Capital and Esther Wojcicki, educator and mother of Anne Wojcicki, who is joining Treehub as a founding adviser.

“I’ve seen what happens when brilliant scientists get the right support at the right moment,” said Anne Wojcicki. “Treehub is building the infrastructure to make that repeatable and at the scale and speed the healthcare industry actually needs.”

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