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Austin Walters is the Founder and Managing Partner of SpringTide Ventures, a firm…
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Austin Walters shared thisWe just wrapped up my favorite event of the year - Our Annual Meeting and Wave 2026 in Alta, Utah! We brought together 100+ of the brightest minds in healthcare to discuss one question: how do we elevate human health while making today’s system work as well as it can? The conversation was full of incredible insights. Here are highlights from this year’s agenda: New Build - rethinking care delivery from the ground up, with James Hereford (President & CEO, Fairview Health Services), Ricky Bloomfield, MD (Chief Medical Officer, ŌURA), and Jon Lensing MD (Co-Founder & CEO, OpenLoop). They talked about the importance of leveraging tech and AI in the most effective ways, especially to reach patients in care deserts who would otherwise have no access at all. New Roles - reimagining the care team structure and roles, with Willie Underwood, III, MD, MSc, MPH, FACS, MD (President, American Medical Association), Justin Norden, MD, MBA, MPhil (Co-Founder & CEO, Qualified Health), Tom Lindquist (Chief Growth & Strategy Officer, Medica), moderated by Prabhjot Singh, MD PhD (Co-Founder & CEO, Altitude and Senior Advisor, Peterson Center on Healthcare). The conversation focused on who actually belongs on the care team, what roles they play, and how to structure teams around patient outcomes. New Rx - coordinating how drugs reach patients, and at what true cost, with Lynne Nowak, MD (Chief Data & Analytics Officer, Surescripts), George MacKinnon III, PhD, RPh (Founding Dean, School of Pharmacy, Medical College of Wisconsin), moderated by Sahir Jaggi (Founder and CEO of Forus). The discussion centered on ensuring all participants are aligned on incentives and well-coordinated. New Rules - the new frontiers of policy and regulation, with Rick Abramson, MD, MHCDS, FACR (Director, Digital Health Center of Excellence, FDA), Carmel Shachar, JD, MPH (Assistant Clinical Professor of Law, Harvard Law School), and Rafid Fadul, MD, MBA (Chief Medical Officer, Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H)). They dug into how the speed of AI is eroding public trust, and what regulators can do when every advance seems to bring a new breach or failure with it. One of the biggest highlights for me was our keynote speaker, Ambassador Roger Carstens, former U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs. He's spent years negotiating with people holding Americans hostage, and what he kept coming back to was simple. Everyone at the table is a person, and nothing moves until you figure out what the other side needs. Thank you to my team Ryan Morley, Brad Otto, Claire Elizabeth Smith, Josh Cowdin, Gabi Tellez, Henri Fernandez, Whitney Lemmon Taylor, Grace Baker Magleby and everyone who joined us this year for the Wave Summit. Excited to see everyone back in Alta in 2027.
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Austin Walters posted thisDario Amodei’s essay on pacing the frontier starts with healthcare and the belief that AI could cure most major diseases in 5-10 years. He shares that his father died from a disease just a few years before a cure was found, while he survived an early stage cancer that would’ve been untreatable 50 years ago. He is sadly one of many whose lives have been shaped by timing; a few years can make an enormous difference in medicine. The AI safety conversation is especially interesting in healthcare, as the potential upside is enormous and the consequences of getting things wrong are very serious. A recent study tested 31 LLMs on real clinical consultation cases across 10 specialties and found that 76.6% of harmful errors were omissions, meaning the model failed to recommend something that was needed. Another study compared frontier models with purpose-built clinical tools. The best model scored 88 on a medical-knowledge benchmark, compared with 61-63 for the clinical tools. On real clinical queries, blinded clinicians also rated the frontier models slightly higher. Clinical AI is moving into a phase where model capability is just one piece of the equation. As these models improve, we’re going to need better ways of understanding how they perform when patients and clinicians rely on them. At the same time, AI use among physicians has risen from 38% to 81% in just 3 years. There’s a lot we’re going to learn as these systems move from benchmarks into real clinical settings.
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Austin Walters shared thisA hundred years ago, a tuberculosis diagnosis was effectively a death sentence. I came across a piece from the Christensen Institute that got me thinking about how much of medical progress comes from making something previously uncertain more predictable. In the early 1900s, a doctor looking at a patient with a persistent cough, weight loss, and fever had to make a judgment call. “Consumption” could mean tuberculosis, bronchitis, pneumonia, or even lung cancer. There was no reliable way to tell them apart. By the 1920s, physicians had started using patterns across larger groups of patients to estimate what was most likely happening. Medicine was becoming more empirical, even when certainty was still out of reach. Then came streptomycin in 1944, isoniazid in 1952, and rifampin in 1963. Once the bacterial cause was understood and effective treatments were available, tuberculosis could be treated predictably, by less specialized clinicians and outside the expensive sanatorium model. This progression shows up all over healthcare. A condition becomes better understood, its presentation can be recognized, its treatment can be defined. Eventually, what once depended on a specialist's judgment can become a protocol, a diagnostic, a drug, or software that makes that knowledge reproducible. The opportunity in healthcare is often in the gap between what a handful of experts know how to do and what the broader healthcare system can reliably deliver. Closing this gap helps care become easier to deliver, more consistent, and less expensive. https://lnkd.in/gb6UtFSCDoes reduced health spending mean reduced care quality? Just the opposite, says disruption theory. - Christensen InstituteDoes reduced health spending mean reduced care quality? Just the opposite, says disruption theory. - Christensen Institute
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Austin Walters posted thisSome VC bets pay off fast, while others ask for years of patience. AI companies are moving at a speed that makes the latter feel almost quaint, but most of the world (healthcare, biotech, infrastructure) still runs on longer cycles. The founders will visibly age by the time it pays off. Every dollar allocated to a long cycle is a dollar sitting out somewhere else. In 483 BCE, the Athenians struck an unexpectedly rich vein of silver at the mines of Laurion. The natural instinct was to distribute the windfall directly to citizens. Instead, a general named Themistocles stood before the Athenian assembly and made the case for reinvestment. He argued that Persia had been watching Greece for years and Athens was exposed. Build the navy now, he told them, before the window closes. The assembly voted with him, and 7 years later, that fleet destroyed the Persian armada at Salamis and secured the classical world. Themistocles had to persuade a room, and so do you. Partnership decisions rarely belong to one person. There can be comfort in a kind of distributed accountability that takes weight off any single conviction. But when you’re across the table from your new favorite team, a founder you believe in who needs your check, it can be frustrating to be the only one who sees the opportunity and has the urgency. So you go back to the room. You have studied the market, spent time with the team, watched the competitors. You lay out what you know and you make the case for patience over the faster path, for the company in front of you over the ones that have already proven themselves somewhere else. There were many smart people in Athens, Themistocles just saw further and was able to convince the assembly to trust him. The citizens who voted with Themistocles traded a one-time payout for something that compounded across generations, with Athens becoming the dominant force in the Mediterranean world and holding its position for centuries. Convincing a room to trust that kind of arc is most of what we do. A slice of the right watermelon will always beat walking out with a raisin.
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Austin Walters shared thisThe New York Times ran a piece this week on the $44 billion wearables market. On the surface, the story is about competition. ŌURA sued seven competitors over patent infringement, Apple Watch got tangled in its own litigation, Google paid $2.1 billion for Fitbit (now part of Google) in 2021 to get into a category it had no presence in. Underneath that there’s something else happening. Samsung bought Xealth - A Samsung Company, a platform that pipes consumer health data directly into hospital systems. Apple is working with Epic, which runs electronic health records for a significant portion of American medicine. Google pulled Fitbit data, third-party app data, and personal health records into a single product called Google Health. Oura took $75 million from Dexcom, a company whose continuous glucose monitors are FDA-cleared, physician-prescribed, and insurance-reimbursed. An IDC analyst quoted in the piece plainly states that the end goal is to become part of the medical ecosystem, because hospitals and physicians recommending these devices is a very lucrative market. Mayo Clinic's director of sports medicine research says in the article that diagnostic tests requiring a hospital visit become unnecessary when the data has already been transmitted to a physician remotely. Regulation, however, remains an open variable. When WHOOP launched a blood pressure estimation feature, the FDA declared it an unapproved medical device. Whoop held its position publicly, and the FDA issued new guidance carving out wellness blood pressure measurements from medical device classification. Selling directly to consumers built a $44 billion market. Adding physician recommendations, insurance reimbursement, and hospital integration will make that number look small. https://lnkd.in/gesM_dEDThe Cutthroat Wearables Battle Is About More Than Tracking Your FitnessThe Cutthroat Wearables Battle Is About More Than Tracking Your Fitness
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Austin Walters posted thisThe burden of age-related diseases in the US is projected to surpass $7 trillion by 2050. With about 80% of Americans 65+ living with at least one chronic condition, the scale of longevity category as an investment opportunity is hard to ignore. However, the real opportunity isn’t extending how long we live. It’s improving how well we live. But before you get lured in with a shiny deck, here are five things our investor Henri Fernandez thinks you should keep in mind, courtesy of his time at Outcove Vitality Longevity Conference: 1. What is the company actually trying to change? Rejuvenation means reversing a biological trait toward a younger state. Slowing the progression of age-related decline is a different claim, and the evidence should be evaluated accordingly. 2. There is no accepted biomarker of aging or established primary endpoint for an aging trial, and the FDA does not recognize “aging” as a standalone indication. We’d want to know which indication a company can actually pursue, what endpoint it will measure, how it will handle placebo response, and how its regulatory strategy gets from a longevity thesis to an approvable therapy. 3. Know what counts as evidence. Right-to-try access can generate compelling individual patient stories, but an n=1 experience tells you very little about efficacy across a population. We’d want to understand the quality, scale, and clinical relevance of the evidence behind every major claim. 4. A company should have a defensible explanation for which diseases its biology can affect. Pediatric cancers and inherited diseases are useful tests of that logic because their disease burden does not automatically translate into a longevity market. 5. Understand what the longevity thesis is doing in the company’s clinical strategy. Some longevity biotechs are pursuing conventional disease indications because that is where the regulatory path exists. We’d want to understand whether the aging biology is driving the therapeutic strategy or primarily shaping the company’s story to investors. The science may eventually support a much bigger category than exists today. For investors, the opportunity is to figure out which companies are building something that supports that future and which are co-opting its language.
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Austin Walters shared thisWelcome to the team, Henri! I couldn't be happier to be working with Henri, and hope you're all able to meet him soon.Austin Walters shared thisWe're excited to welcome Henri Fernandez to the SpringTide Ventures team as an Investor. Henri has built his career around one question: How do you help transformative healthcare ideas become transformative healthcare companies? Henri has always been fascinated by revolutions. His parents escaped one in Nicaragua. Today, he spends his time searching for another, backing founders building the technologies that could revolutionize healthcare. Most recently, Henri graduated from Stanford Graduate School of Business as an Arjay Miller Scholar. He served as Managing Partner of the 26 Fund, a student-led $1.9 million venture fund investing in Stanford startups, and led the Healthcare Venture Team for the GSB Impact Fund, sourcing and evaluating Seed and Series A investments across healthcare. Before Stanford, Henri spent over six years investing across the healthcare ecosystem. At Royalty Pharma, he led biopharmaceutical investment analyses that helped drive more than $2 billion in opportunities and built firm-wide research initiatives spanning therapeutics, clinical development, and financial innovation. Henri is happiest talking with founders who are obsessed with solving hard problems. He loves exploring breakthrough technologies, stress-testing go-to-market strategies, and partnering with entrepreneurs from the earliest days to build companies advancing healthcare AI, robotics, longevity, wellness, and the future of patient care. Outside of investing, Henri co-founded Shine Small, a nonprofit supporting minority-owned small businesses throughout New York City. Away from work, he is an avid skier, a devoted reader of U.S. and world history, and enjoys discovering live music and the local businesses that make every community unique.
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Austin Walters shared thisI'm thrilled to announce Dopl Technologies' oversubscribed $6.3M Seed round, led by SpringTide Ventures, with major investment from Washington Research Foundation (WRF Capital), TVF | Tacoma Venture Fund, Precursor Ventures, and many others. Dopl combines ultrasound, robotics, AI, computer vision, haptics, and advanced networking to remove geography as a barrier to healthcare access. The opportunity to continue doing so is enormous. I've enjoyed working alongside Ryan James, PhD and Steve Seslar on the board, and look forward to sharing the amazing developments along the way!
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Austin Walters posted thisWhat is a Limited Partner (LP)? Most founders can name every investor on their cap table. Far fewer can tell you who those investors answer to. When a venture fund writes you a check, the money isn't the firm's. It belongs to the fund's LPs, and that relationship explains a lot about how your investors behave. A fund typically has two sides: - General partners (GPs) raise the fund, pick the investments, take board seats, and manage the portfolio. - Limited partners (LPs) supply the capital: endowments, pensions, foundations, family offices, and high net worth individuals. "Limited" refers to liability. An LP commits a fixed amount, their exposure is capped there, and in return they hand the decisions to the GPs, who take on the duty of managing that money toward a return. For founders, this explains the clock you're on. Most venture funds run a ten-year life, and GPs are tasked with returning as much capital as possible inside that window. It's why an investor who seems relaxed about your product gets sharp about your timeline. We have to answer to our investors too. How a GP treats the founders they have funded is also a function, albeit indirectly, of the quality of the firm’s relationship with their LPs. If they’ve sidelined their LPs, kept them in the dark, over-promised, delayed tough announcements, or otherwise have not built or earned strong trust through the good and bad times of managing the most challenging type of portfolio in the world, they will be under a lot of negative pressure to show results, sometimes within time frames that don’t align with the interests of their portfolio companies. We try to increase the trust our LPs have in us by making the limitation of their liability the only limitation of their partnership with us. In practice this means, for example: - Reporting real numbers: Our quarterly LP updates show the actual KPIs for every company in every fund: revenue at investment, revenue today, cash on hand, cash runway. If a company is struggling, our LPs know before they ask. - No favored nations: No LP quietly gets better terms than the one beside them. - Big decisions go to a vote: When we accelerated ownership of management fees from the LP to the GP, every LP had the chance to weigh in after we had done our due diligence with the bankers, attorneys, and LPAC. - Oh, and DPI! And a clear plan for managing for and generating liquidity in a very illiquid asset class, both at the end of the fund life, and along the way. Neither Founders nor the GPs who fund them ever truly run out of capital, but they may run out of trust.
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General-purpose large language models outperform specialized clinical AI tools on medical benchmarks: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04431-5
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Austin Walters reacted on thisAustin Walters reacted on thisCame back from one of my favorite events of the year, the SpringTide Ventures Wave Summit! One of the most memorable parts of the Summit was how, despite AI and major innovation being ever-present in the conversation, every panel stayed grounded in the reality that much of the U.S. still faces care deserts and limited access to care. AI will undoubtedly play a major role in the future of healthcare but we still have to address the most fundamental barriers to care today. Innovation only goes so far if people can’t access the care they need. Thank you to Austin Walters, Grace Baker Magleby, Whitney Lemmon Taylor, and the entire SpringTide team for organizing such a thoughtful, well-curated event and bringing together some of the brightest minds in healthcare and beyond.
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Austin Walters reacted on thisAustin Walters reacted on thisDid you know its the year of the fire horse? Boldness is rewarded this year. It's a year to trust your instincts, embrace change and seek growth. And that's what I did when I chose to make the leap from my 16 years as a Professor at El Paso Community College to a new role as a Program Officer at the El Paso Community Foundation and Co-director of the Plaza Classic Film Festival. My time at EPCC has been the most rewarding of my professional career. I believe deeply in the college’s mission to provide quality, affordable education to the border region. It has been gratifying to support this goal in a variety of ways throughout my tenure at the institution and I'm grateful to continue working as adjunct faculty. I have been given an opportunity to support our community in a different way, and so far, it seems to be just what this year intended. How are you embracing the year of the fire horse?
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Austin Walters reacted on thisAustin Walters reacted on thisJust returned from the Wave Summit in Alta, Utah, where I joined James Hereford of Fairview Health Services and Ricky Bloomfield, MD of ŌURA to talk about what care delivery looks like if you rethink it from the ground up. I’ve been talking a lot about consumerism in healthcare. During our panel, we got into how it’s affecting traditional systems more. Even a small inconvenience, like having to reschedule a check-in, can be enough for a patient to drop out of care. We also discussed how AI and telehealth can reach patients in care deserts, and why so many people with insurance now choose to pay cash. When you can't find out what something will cost, a flat price starts to look like the better deal. One thing we all agreed on is that AI won't replace the decades of a physician's wisdom and knowledge, and it shouldn't. Where it can help right now is the admin work that pulls physicians away from their patients. Thank you Brad Otto of SpringTide Ventures for moderating our panel and for the whole SpringTide Ventures team for organizing such a great event!
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Austin Walters reacted on thisAustin Walters reacted on thisToday is a big day for Enable Ventures. I am humbled to share that we have closed our $50.31 million debut fund, the first market-rate venture fund dedicated to closing the disability wealth gap through investments in cutting-edge, AI-driven technology. We launched Enable in 2022 with the belief that disability-inclusive design could push innovation into entirely new frontiers. I am especially grateful to Jim Sorenson and the Sorenson Impact Group for their early support and partnership. Today, our portfolio includes 11 high-growth companies across worktech, digital health, and assistive technology that are putting that belief into practice. And the secret is out: inclusive technology is not a niche or a nice-to-have. When products are designed from the outset with the disability community at the center, they can be more effective, reach broader markets, and generate both meaningful impact and competitive financial returns. Thank you to our investors, founders, partners, and team for their trust and conviction. Most of all, thank you to my outstanding Enable team members, Charlotte Magee, PhD and Emma Stone! This milestone belongs to everyone who believed in this vision and helped bring it to life. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/eqr3qPpf #EnableVentures #VentureCapital #ImpactInvesting #ArtificialIntelligence #DisabilityTech #PrivateMarkets
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Austin Walters liked thisAustin Walters liked thisA fun role for me this week: event support. SpringTide Ventures invited FeatherQuest to lead a birding walk during Wave Summit at Alta, which gave me the chance to meet some fascinating people and hear some incredible speakers along the way. A pretty unique place for birding to take me. Great meeting Austin WaltersAustin Walters, Sharad Mishra, D. Patrick OstendarpD. Patrick Ostendarp, Whitney Lemmon TaylorWhitney Lemmon Taylor, and Dustin Cook along the way! Check out the full FeatherQuest recap, photos, and birds we found: https://lnkd.in/g7s8hFW5
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Austin Walters liked thisAustin Walters liked thisIt’s not every day you get to meet a hostage negotiator. Had the opportunity to spend some time with Ambassador Roger Carstens. It took me by surprise just how remarkably human and down to earth he was. He was a total gentleman, and a heck of a storyteller...I could have listened to his stories all night. The why behind his work was deeply meaningful. His superpower is staying human in some of the most stressful, high-pressure situations imaginable. Listening. Making people feel heard. Building strategic amounts of relationship equity with killers, terrorists, and dictators in order to bring innocent Americans home. Roger, I enjoyed our conversation more than you’ll know. And a big thank you to you and the entire team behind you for the work you've done and the lives you've changed.
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Austin Walters liked thisAustin Walters liked thisHello from Alta, Utah! 🏔️ Here's a little peek at SpringTide Ventures' 2026 Wave Summit! We've loved partnering with SpringTide to develop this signature event, a gathering where top senior leaders in healthcare can engage deeply with the technologies, policies, and care and payment models driving the future. We can't wait to share more insights with you soon. (And a case study about our work with SpringTide to build this summit!)
Experience & Education
Licenses & Certifications
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Social and Economic Networks: Models and Analysis
Coursera Course Certificates
Volunteer Experience
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Strategic Advisor
To Ukraine With Love
- Present 4 years 4 months
Disaster and Humanitarian Relief
We provide as much shelter and food as possible to Ukrainians who've been displaced by the Russo-Ukrainian war.
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Full-time Missionary
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
- 2 years 2 months
Education
Served as a full-time missionary in Eastern Ukraine for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Learned the Russian language, deepened understanding of God's word, and grew to love the people of Ukraine. Served as a Zone Leader and Assistant to the President in training and learning from ~120 fellow missionaries from around the world.
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Big Brother
Big Brother Big Sister Foundation, Inc.
- 5 years 8 months
Children
Formed meaningful, life-long relationship with my "Little Brother" John via bi-monthly outings and weekly phone updates.
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President
The Harvard Business School Club of Utah
- 4 years 8 months
Education
The HBS Club of Utah plans and coordinates quarterly educational events for HBS alumni in Utah.
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Harvard Community Action Partners Consultant
Plimoth Plantation
- 9 months
Arts and Culture
This CAP project entails developing a marketing and communication plan to help leverage the
upcoming Plymouth 400 anniversaries. The plan will focus on improving the visitor experience
and expanding opportunities to utilize museum assets, particularly during the off season.
Courses
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Agribusiness
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Building Life Science Businesses
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Building and Sustaining Successful Enterprises (BSSE)
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Business at the Base of the Pyramid (B-BOP)
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CS50
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Corporate Finance
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Doing Business in China
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Entrepreneurial Finance
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Entrepreneurship and Healthcare in Emerging Economies
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Family Office Wealth Management
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Financial Accounting
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Leadership and Organizational Behavior
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Marketing
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Product Management 101
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Technology & Operations Management
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The Moral Leader
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Projects
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Ultrasound in Primary Care Medicine
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See projectThe next disruptive opportunity for diagnostic ultrasound lies in expanding access to this important imaging technology to skilled nurses, internal medicine doctors, and family physicians.
Honors & Awards
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Second Year Honors
Harvard Business School
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Eagle Scout
Boy Scouts of America
Languages
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English
Native or bilingual proficiency
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Russian
Professional working proficiency
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French
Professional working proficiency
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Welsh
Elementary proficiency
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Spanish
Limited working proficiency
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Japanese
Elementary proficiency
Organizations
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American Society of Echocardiography
Member
- Present
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