How Midas Lister Annie Lamont Became a Tech Tech Heavy Hitter
Before she became First Lady of Connecticut, Midas author Annie Lamont was betting early on health technology — and reaping big rewards. Forty years into investing, he’s reinventing himself for the AI era.
By Rashi SrivastavaForbes staff
To January 2001, AthenaHealth colleagues met with investor Annie Lamont to share the bad news: the two main customers of the three-year-old health startup, which provided software for managing medical records, bills and claims, were cutting ties. There will be great sales success.
Jonathan Bush, the company’s CEO, asked Lamont if he planned to sue to get his $15 million check back. He was just kidding. “Of course not,” Lamont replied. Instead of following large hospital systems, they would focus on small group practices.
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Two decades later, Lamont’s faith in Bush and co-founder Todd Park was rewarded when their business was sold to two private equity firms for $17 billion in 2021, roughly 20x from his first check. “This was a long road,” Lamont said now of the bumpy bed, but it’s finally paying off. “We respected him because he didn’t hold back,” Bush said Forbes.
Lamont’s long-term approach to such relationships, which can span decades, also paid off when he supported Park’s latest project, Devoted Health. With Devoted Health now valued at $12.9 billion, his initial $20 million investment in 2017 in the Medicare Advantage insurance plan provider is now worth $1 billion to Lamont and his supporters. at Oak HC/FT, an investment firm he founded in 2014.
Those investments, and others in the healthcare and fintech space such as early-stage primary care provider VillageMD and prepaid debit card provider NetSpend land Lamont back on the Midas List, Forbes‘ annual ranking of the world’s top tech investors. It’s his fifth appearance but the first since 2015, a sign of the long-game approach Lamont is taking to start investing. “These are friends, these are comrades,” he said. “We are at war and we don’t have a long time of 10 years for one company, but 20 to 30 years for three or four companies.”
For Lamont, 67, the $5.3 billion-in-assets Oak HC/FT is the latest chapter in a multi-firm, four-decade career, with lifetime investments in 80 companies. an estimated $1.5 billion from investors over the past decade, according to a source familiar with the firm’s finances. Lamont is a prominent figure outside the project, too: the spouse of Connecticut governor Ned Lamont, has served as First Lady of Connecticut since 2019.
The secret to Lamont’s sustained success, he says: the ability to see and embrace new technologies, even if it forces him to divert his attention to a more lucrative path. With the advent of the internet, he changed his focus from life science to digital health. And as online payments have become more ubiquitous in the years since PayPal’s rise, it has sought to focus on fintech startups, too.
“It’s not about being the biggest surprise in business. It’s about reinventing yourself on different levels,” Lamont said.
Lhigh interest in health care is a combination of its inefficiency, he said. He grew up in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, the youngest of six children. When her father, a real estate agent without health insurance, became ill, she became the breadwinner, suspending her studies at Stanford for a semester in her junior year to go home to make money. It really affected my life. “I came back my senior year very concerned about getting a job and making sure I could make a living.”
When Lamont graduated from college in 1979, his first job was as a paralegal at a small law firm, working with engineers to automate complex legal discovery processes with software. He quit after six months. “I was more interested in the technology of it than I was in defending a guilty client at the time,” Lamont said.
In 1980, he joined Hambrecht and Quist, a small retail VC firm that was smartly betting on the future behemoths of Silicon Valley. A few months after signing on, he was part of a team that worked with Apple CEO Steve Jobs on a key moment in the company’s history: the tech giant’s first public offering later that year. . Lamont’s role included the arduous task of carrying Jobs’ bags across California as they met with potential investors as part of the company’s roadshow. He added: “He was only a year and a half older than me, but he had great confidence.
Two years later, after a random introduction from a friend, Lamont joined the multi-stage VC firm Oak Investment Partners. In the following decades, he established a life sciences and health care arm, backing businesses such as the biopharma firm Cephalon (acquired by Israel-based Teva Pharmaceuticals for $6.8 billion) and the manufacturing giant of the drug Genzyme, (acquired by the French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi for $ 20 billion).
In the year 2000, when about 300 million people were using the internet, Lamont decided that he should move to invest where the best entrepreneurs lived. He shifted his investments to technology-based healthcare services, backing AthenaHealth and Castlight Health, a healthcare price comparison platform that raised $3 billion in IPOs. He appeared on the Midas List for the first time in 2008.
But the firm was struggling overall, according to an Investor Center report, and in 2014, Lamont teamed up with two colleagues, Andrew Adams and Patricia Kemp, to start a new firm with and the same name, Oak HC/FT. (Kemp took on an advisory role in 2023, according to his LinkedIn.) Oak HC/FT raised $500 million for its first fund, and $1.94 billion for its latest, the fifth of the factory.
In the decade since then, Lamont’s Oak HC/FT portfolio has driven health technology strategy. Highlights include CareBridge, a virtual care and home technology provider for caregivers; Main Street Health, which specializes in rural markets; and BrightLine, which provides mental health treatment for children. He has also backed companies such as One Medical (acquired by Amazon for $3.9 billion in 2023), primary care provider VillageMD (valued at $15.8 billion, per Pitchbook) and payments platform Rapyd (valued at $8.75 billion).
For founders working with Lamont today, his extensive experience can serve as a “cloud of wisdom” and a steadying force, said Park, CEO of Devoted Health. Brad Smith, CEO of Main Street Health, which provides health care in rural areas, is now working on the third Lamont-supported. (“Annie was our anchor investor,” he explained.) Lamont’s network helped source the chief growth officer and CEO for two of Smith’s startups, he said. we. He is also the first person he calls to talk about strategic decisions such as choosing the best type of investment. “He’s seen so many different investors at different levels that he’s got a unique insight whereas my experience is very limited,” he said.
Lamont’s long career of successful betting in business has paid for itself: Forbes estimated his net worth at $650 million, ranking him No. 54 on the list of self-made women in May.
She has had more personal influence, too, since the 2018 election, and the re-election of husband Ned Lamont as governor of the state of Connecticut. That additional role gave Lamont a comprehensive view of how the state thinks about certain programs and policies, such as Medicaid, which makes him a good investor, he said.
It also gets him checked at times. In July 2021, he faced questions about Oak HC/FT’s investment in health data testing company Sema4, which was awarded government contracts to provide Covid-19 testing to citizens. The Lamonts denied any involvement in those contracts, and the Connecticut Office of State Ethics later determined that there was no conflict of interest under state law. Sema4 stopped testing that December. As recently as 2023, Governor Lamont faced questions about Oak HC/FT listing Sanabil Investments, a Saudi sovereign wealth fund, as a minority partner.
For his part, Lamont says he and his partner can help each other learn, but otherwise avoid potential conflicts. “We have solutions that are sold mostly to health plans and providers, not the government,” he said. Being in Connecticut, not the Silicon Valley base of many of his firm’s startups, helps, too. She said: “If my husband was the governor of California, that might be more of a problem.
Today, Oak HC/FT’s team of about 50 employees focuses on helping entrepreneurs with several key areas, Lamont said. Hiring is a big deal, at all levels. Then there’s artificial intelligence, specifically emerging AI, and how it can impact health businesses both new and old. Used thoughtfully and responsibly, AI can reduce administrative costs, increase physician productivity and improve patient outcomes, Lamont said.
With that in mind, he backs companies like Notable, a platform that provides automation tools for manual tasks like patient screening and admissions, and Trovo Health, which sells AI assistants for nurses. “We’re focused on increasing speed and reducing friction,” he said. “In healthcare, there’s a lot of opportunity with … data, I think there’s going to be a big impact there.”
For Lamont, this is the latest technological breakthrough that requires a new approach to his investment, just like the rise of the Internet 25 years ago. “I wouldn’t have a job today if I wasn’t determined then,” Lamont said. “Now everyone should be incorporating AI into everything they do.”
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