A new residency-venture program helps to tackle one of the most pressing issues in the U.S. — healthcare.

Mary Minno, an investor and former product manager at Google, announced on Wednesday the launch of an early-stage startup accelerator program, Treehub, and an early-stage venture firm, AI Health Fund, aimed at backing startups working at the intersection of healthcare and AI. The AI Health Fund is the venture arm of the Treehub residency, where founders apply to incubate their ideas.

The residency program lasts six months — the first 12 weeks are dedicated to helping founders find product-market fit, and the last 12 weeks are focused on company direction, Minno said. “It could be raising a large round, it could be joining a traditional accelerator, or perhaps deploying across a hospital system.”

She got the idea for launching a residency and a program late last year when she was six weeks postpartum with her second child, and when a family member was diagnosed with acute leukemia, going from “being very healthy to very sick virtually overnight,” she said. She didn’t like how hard it was to find a specialist for this family member, how long they had to wait before they could be treated after being diagnosed, and how policy and outdated technology often slowed down the treatment process.

Image Credits:TreeHub

“It’s only when people went outside of that system and broke the rules that things could happen,” she said. “I realized that we need more startups here because they’re going to challenge the status quo.”

So she turned to her long-time friend Esther Wojcicki (an educator and mother of the late former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki). Esther was once Minno’s high school journalism teacher, and the two have remained close ever since. The two spoke about how to increase innovation in the health sector and about how academics — often the ones with lots of research — struggle to get startup ideas off the ground.

The problem is that they don’t really know how to tell a good story, at least not in the way venture investors like to hear, and they also don’t know how to commercialize their research well, Minno said. She and Wojcicki wanted to build a program that would team operators with academic-focused founders, “similar to the way Adventure Studio would in order to teach them the art of building a business.”

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In addition to launching the Treehub residency, for which founders must apply, Minno and Esther decided to team up with members of the biomedical data science department at Stanford to launch the AI Health Fund, writing early checks (ranging from $50,000 to $150,000) to companies coming from academic circles. The fund intends to raise $10 million, and made its first close last year at $1.5 million, Minno said. They raised $500,000 from family and friends, then received a $1 million check from billionaire VC Tim Draper.

Anne Wojcicki has joined as an operating partner, while Esther serves as founding advisor. The Stanford team includes Roxana Daneshjou, an assistant professor of biomedical data science and dermatology at Stanford Medicine; Minno’s husband, Derek, who is president of the VC firm Point Capital, and Alexander Ioannidis, an assistant professor of biomedical data science and genetics at Stanford.

The AI Health Fund is hoping to back at least 60 companies in this first iteration of the program. The fund was set up as a separate vehicle because Minno also wanted to back founders who might not go through the program or who might be second-or third-time founders without a need for the Treehub program, but who still have a good idea.

With that said, the AI Fund has already backed 12 companies from the Treehub program, including the women’s hormone tracker Clair Health (which also went through a16z speedrun), and researcher Dennis Walls new company focused on pediatric autism.

Minno said the residency is still in its experimental phase as the team works out the best way to approach the accelerator-fund approach. She said the residency program’s true value prop is that it hopes to work with founders at the earliest stage, before there is even a company.

“In more than half the cases, we introdu

Esther and Anne Wojcicki join new healthcare accelerator, fund