AI Changing Consumer Investing, Asana’s AI Agents, The Digital Health Revolution | Sep 25, 2025

0:13Welcome, everyone, to the Informations TI TV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Thursday, September 25th. We are taking a full tour of the tech sector today, folks. We are talking consumer with Kirsten Green from Forerunner Ventures, who is coming on the show in just a minute. We've also got the founder of Sword Health coming on the show. We're going to talk to him about the business of digital health. We're then going to talk with the chief operating officer of Astana. They've got some new products coming out today. And I am really excited about a conversation that we've got planned with our financial analysis columnist about Oracle's valuation, which has obviously become very much a center of attention in the land of AI over the past few weeks.

0:55But before we get going with that, I want to highlight for you a story that we just put out this morning at The Information. Investment bankers have been busier than ever lately with data center deals that big tech companies cannot get enough of. And so today, we've put together a list of 11 bankers who should absolutely be on your radar. We've got someone from Centerview on the list. He brought together the Scale AI and Meta deal for$29 billion. We've got someone from Catalyst Partners who did CoreWeave's deal to buy Weights and Biases for$1.7 billion. There are also leaders from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan.

1:30It is a great story. We will make sure to link it in the show notes. Okay, let's get to our first guest. Forerunner Ventures has become one of the most exciting venture firms around because of the portfolio that it has built. It has many consumer startups that have become household names in the land of tech. It has invested in Chime, Aura, Glossier, Headway, Hymns and Hers. I want to bring on the founder of the firm, Kirsten Green, to talk about this moment for the business of consumer. It's her first time on the show. Kirsten, welcome to TITV. It's great to have you. Hi, Akash. It's great to be here.

2:06Thank you for that really nice introduction. So we have so much to get to and so little time, but we're going to try to make the most of it here. Look, I think the way I kind of want to start things off is I want the Kirsten Green blueprint on how to build a great consumer company in 2025 because so much has changed. And yet, I don't know, a great consumer company, I mean, is it really that different than it was 15 years ago with the way people's behaviors are? Talk to us about how you think about that. Okay. I love this topic and I love this moment. because I do think that new technology that creates new possibilities sort of begs people to really rethink what an amazing product or service or experience is.

2:49And I'm certainly not suggesting that we don't consider past learnings and existing behaviors, but I do think it's a moment to really allow yourself to step back and be imaginative, be courageous with your thinking and your approach, and play with the new technology. and don't be afraid to try new things. I think that if you look back on many of the past breakout moments, they might've come to market and people might've thought, I don't get it for me, whatever. And then there's early adopters, they bring people along and a movement starts. And that's really where change happens. And I do think that that's a big thing that we're excited about in general in this industry is inventing the future.

3:37and inventing new. And right now we have new technology to play with. So amazing time. Do you think the AI has changed the consumer category forever? I think AI has changed most everything forever. And with respect to the consumer category, I actually think we're at this really interesting moment where if you look back on many of the technology breakthroughs, it's been slower to get adoption. This has been unprecedented speed of adoption on the consumer side. And I would argue that consumers have been leading this adoption period. And one part of it is because we're in a much more connected digital world and everybody is online trying things.

4:22But another reason is because consumers' experience of AI right now is it's magic. And I think that that actually is the opportunity, but it's also one of the challenges right now. Because all of us that are here building it, we think of it more as magical than magic. And that difference is that it's a lot of work to bring that to life. And so I would characterize it as, in many ways, the consumer's expectation for what's possible or what should happen is ahead of the build right now. And that's one of the, again, opportunities and challenges of this moment in time. Right. So you had this conference a couple months ago, the Humans in the Loop conference, and I was watching some of the interviews you did after that conference, recapping it.

5:07One of the things you mentioned came up during the discussion was, how do you deal with the 800-pound gorillas in the room, the open AIs, the large tech companies who have a lot of resources to invest and spread their bets across a number of applications, not the least of which are consumer bets. And the point that you made in a lot of these was that there are verticals or there appear to be verticals where those large companies won't actually dominate. And what I want to ask you is what are the verticals where you think there is room and where they won't actually, you know, capture all the market and consumer?

5:46Okay. So it's a two-part question here. And I think on the first point about just like, how do you navigate being new or being the underdog sort of to come to market when there's these big platform players? I think that if you look back on history, there is a sea of failed products that have been launched by big tech companies. Big tech companies thinking they have the audience, thinking they have the resources. And, you know, as natural, you're playing around the edges because something sounds exciting. But the execution, the kind of precision at which you understand that particular slice of the market, that particular need, They have failed many times and new companies have come to rise in that context.

6:29And so I think that people should keep that in mind that it's a possibility. And maybe a best case scenario is you have a big company that's starting to introduce ideas, that's starting to prime the market for you. But if you come at it with precision, with expertise, with imagination, there is a possibility and it's been proven in history. and I think it will play out again this time, where new new can emerge. And is there an example of an area here where you feel like the idea might have been introduced, but the execution isn't going as well as it could be? And maybe that poses an opportunity?

7:07Well, I think, so if you look at, ChatGPT put the report out last week about the ways in which people are using ChatGPT. It was fascinating. To me, that's a roadmap of opportunity. Yes, that's partly their opportunity, but it's everybody else's opportunity for the same framework I'm saying now. Is their version of that the best it can possibly be? um i you know at the risk of i think perplexities playing with shopping have you changed your shopping habits to go there yet like no it's hard like what does it take to do it i mean i'm rooting for all these players to do it because i think it's part of what brings the industry along but i think while you're trying to be good at so many things like it's very hard to nail a particular verticalized experience.

7:57And so actually, Akash, without hopefully not sounding like a Pollyanna, I think everything on that chart is kind of fair game. Now, OpenAI, for instance, has come and said they're really interested in science, they're really interested in health. No surprise. Those are huge, big categories. Is that a one-size-fits-all? How many big markets and experiences are there to be had inside of that one category? I would argue a lot. And I think in most cases, You look at companies that are big, huge scaled companies now, and very often, if not always, they started with a wedge into the market. So it's kind of one of the things we're looking for right now, which is where's that founder that has the ambition, has sort of the early signals that say, like, I could imagine this person being the leader of a big company and kind of continuing to push further, but has a focused precision about how to meet the market right now and use that as an opportunity to build credibility and business foundation.

8:51Right. You talked about health, and health is certainly an area that we're trying to talk more about on the show. Your firm is investors in Aura, and I know one of your partners has a board seat on the company, and it's been an exciting week of news for Aura. The company put out some news about how many rings they've sold. And also it's been reported that they are raising money at a valuation just shy of$11 billion. And I want to talk about the business, but tell us,$11 billion, does that sound about right to you? I mean, I'm not the one to confirm these things. I'm sure the company will make announcements when the time is right.

9:30But I think, you know, to your point, like this is an exciting story. And a shout out to my partner, who I think has been, I know, has been an incredible champion and constructive partner to the company. Right. And we had Tom on the show, and he actually, on the show, he revealed the company's 2024 revenue figures for the first time,$500 million, which is, again, it's projected to double this year. It's according to reports right now. So we'll get that when the time comes. What I do want to ask you about, though, is where you – and look, at some point, we should have your partner on the show to talk more about this.

10:04But where do you see Aura's business going two, three years from now? Because there is sort of this trend around things becoming more medical, right? You know, you see some of these wearables companies now. A lot of them now, you know, even 8Sleep looking to apply for FDA approval for their products, right? You know, we have Whoop also moving in that direction of working with the FDA on things. I mean, where do you see this going? Is getting FDA approval, is that like the competitive advantage now? Does it become easier for companies as the research evolves? How do you think of that in the health context?

10:40Okay. So I would say like a competitive advantage in this context is like, for instance, Aura having 5.5 million rings on people's fingers and that number growing at a really exponential rate. It's increasing where it's been before. And if you have that many people that are engaged with that product, are sharing data, I mean, I think that that is an incredible signal to the market. It's an incredible audience to keep building from. And if you think about like Like imagining as you identified health as a big category, all the different places that you can go from health in that sphere. Like, okay, yes, there's the FDA topics.

11:19I don't know that that's like, it depends on what you want to do if like that's a critical advantage to go there too. But there's, you know, everything from kind of medical research. There's all of the insurance aspect. There's all of the ways in which these are guiding people's decisions about their future health routines and their future health purchases. So this is a great example of like that wedge into the market, being that consumer relationship that got built around communicating the importance of sleep, giving them a tool to understand the sleep in the context of their health, and now saying, okay, let's go on this together further.

11:55What else can we do? And this team has that ambition. And I think they have so many ways that they can build the company out from there to really be a full-fledged health platform. Right. Right. And, you know, that's Aura as a use case, but that's an example of what we were talking about before in consumer. Right. Right. Last question, I'm afraid, before we let you go, you know, there is sort of this tale of two cities stories, I guess, in consumer, which is that a lot of these consumer companies that get big, they get big really fast. And then we've seen companies, certainly in the e-commerce world, going public and their businesses have struggled sort of, you know, since the time they've gone public.

12:34Like, how do you kind of square these two realities? You know, maybe if we just narrow it to e-commerce. We can narrow it to e-commerce or we can expand it out to the whole market and even beyond consumer. I do think it's like, in some ways, the life cycle of a company. And it's like the journey that you go on. And some companies have the vision and the execution and the opportunity to keep getting bigger and keep expanding from where they are. And some companies stall out. And that can be the execution of the team. It can be the vision of the team. It can be changes in the market that weren't responded to in the moment.

13:09It can be letting somebody come in and being that much better than you that whatever was your competitive advantage, you didn't step into. So I think that if you had to summarize it, I would call it it's a case of you can never let yourself think that you won. You just need to think you keep having an opportunity and what's next and aiming towards that. Great. Well, Kirsten, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's an exciting portfolio that you have, and I'm excited to have you on more and more as there is more news to come of it. That is Kirsten Green, the founder at Forerunner Ventures.

13:41Okay. Oracle upsized its latest debt offering yesterday from$15 billion to$18 billion. The company is selling bonds that mature as far out as 40 years from now. This, of course, is all part of the company's way of funding the more than$300 billion in cloud contracts it has with OpenAI and other AI companies. Let's not forget, it is also building all of those data centers. I want to bring on Anita Ramaswamy to talk about Oracle's valuation in this moment because it is not yet a Mag7 company. It's not quite that big yet, but it is certainly talked about in the same vein as those large tech companies.

14:18Anita, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you. Great to be back, Akash. So let's talk about Oracle. You wrote this great piece last week that I want to get to, but what did you make of the bond sale this week? So the bond sale is kind of an extension of what I was talking about in my last piece, which was Oracle's push to become a cloud provider. Cloud computing is a really capital intensive business and Oracle needs to raise a ton of debt in order to serve some of these customers where they're going to be providing data centers for rental to their customers for AI. Right. Now, you wrote last week about the company's valuation.

14:53And one of the most interesting points you made is that the valuation as of last week on a multiples basis, it's higher than Microsoft for the first time in eight years. And you are our columnist, which means you like to take a stance on whether or not things are too high or too low. What did you make of that? Do you think this is too high? What are the people you're talking to thinking about it? I think it's a little ridiculous given the risks that are inherent in the deal. So, you know, just to run it back for a second, Akash, the reason that Oracle stock skyrocketed a couple of weeks ago when they reported their earnings is because Oracle said that they had a lot of contracted revenue, majority of it coming from OpenAI, which was reported later.

15:36And that contracted revenue is going to increase their future cloud revenue to, you know, from right now, their cloud infrastructure business is around one-fifth or less of their total revenue. And they're saying by 2030, that business is going to be around three-fourths of Oracle's total revenue. So that's massive growth and massive expansion. And I can definitely understand why analysts, investors got excited, bid up the stock. It's still trading about more than 20 % higher than it was when it reported its earnings and when I wrote my column. And so I can understand why there's exuberance in the market.

16:09But at the same time, there are so many risks and challenges that could come with Oracle's push, and that revenue is far from guaranteed at this point. So I think investors are getting a little bit over their skis here. I don't think it's justified at this point that Oracle is trading at a much higher multiple than even Microsoft for the first time in eight years, when Microsoft has had a long track record of owning and running their own cloud business. And what are those risks? So I think the biggest one investors have been talking about is if the majority of the revenue really is coming from OpenAI, as the reporting has suggested, that OpenAI is a startup.

16:43They're burning billions of dollars in cash. Can they really pay this at the end of the day? We don't know the details around how the contract is structured, but that's certainly one risk. I think for Oracle in particular, whether or not they can get a different customer besides OpenAI to fill that capacity, which is what a lot of analysts are arguing. If OpenAI falls through, they're saying there will be other AI customers that will want to use Oracle's cloud servers. But even if that happens, Oracle fundamentally today is a software business. It sells software, it sells databases, it sells enterprise resource planning software for businesses to manage their day-to-day functions.

17:21It is not a cloud computing business. That's a really new and nascent line of business and that's fundamentally lower margin. So I think one of the biggest risks for investors looking at Oracle's pivot into this area is how much capital is it going to take? How is that going to drain Oracle's cash reserves. Already, we've seen for the first time in years, Oracle's free cash flow dipped into the negative recently. And on an ongoing basis, it could mean that their long-term margins come down quite significantly. 40 years is a long time horizon for these bonds. I don't follow the bond market as closely as...

17:57Well, let me put it this way. I don't follow it at all. Okay. So, you know, 40 years to me seems long. So what are your sources telling you about what they're thinking about that? Yeah. So a 40-year bond is highly unusual and Oracle's already really indebted. I mean, they're on the hook for over$110 billion in total debt and they only have about$10 billion in cash on hand. And that was before this bond offering. So we kind of knew and we anticipated Oracle is going to go to the debt markets. And right now it seems like, people are willing to fund the deals, but a 40-year duration really de-risks this kind of deal for bond investors because they're essentially giving Oracle 40 years to pay back the full amount of money.

18:36Not only that, but the interest rate on these bonds, as we've reported, is actually a bit higher than the typical interest rate extended to your corporation that's the size of Oracle. And so I think that that's reflected in the terms of the deal. Right. Now, you talked about the margins as a potential risk in terms of the long-term prospects of the business. I wonder if the people you're talking to, do they not have any concern about sort of the circular flow of cash here between the cloud companies and the AI companies and the chip companies? I mean, is that not a mess waiting to happen maybe?

19:13I mean, the other news story that's really relevant here to your point, Akash, is the OpenAI NVIDIA deal that we just saw announced. There was a letter of intent. OpenAI is going to be taking capital investment from NVIDIA and then using a large amount of that capital to invest in computing infrastructure, which a large chunk of that is probably going to go back to NVIDIA because they're using NVIDIA's chips. Another portion of that could, in theory, go to Oracle because Oracle is sort of renting out the equipment besides the chips that will be used in the data centers. And so there is some circularity here.

19:46And I think that analysts, you know, at the end of the day, a lot of them about that OpenAI NVIDIA deal were very quick to point out that, you know, this is something that just solidifies NVIDIA's dominance. And a lot of them were pointing out that they believe that OpenAI actually approached NVIDIA about the deal. And my point is this, whether or not that is true, which it very well may be, that still doesn't mitigate the concerns or the idea that it's a circular flow of revenue. I mean, at the end of the day, NVIDIA might be in a strong position and they might be dominant in the market, but if they're the only company that long-term has the balance sheet or has the will to keep funding these very capital-intensive deals, then the market would be in a pretty tough place in terms of the liquidity it needs to continue fueling this build out.

20:31Right, right. Great. Well, Anita, thank you so much for coming on and talking about it. It's something that it's great to get all these different perspectives on. And we've had some analysts and investors on as well. Next time we get one of these juicy press releases, we'll have you back on again to help us break it all down. That is Anita Ramaswamy, our financial analysis columnist here at The Information. Okay, well, digital health has become one of the most exciting applications of AI and Sword Health is using the technology to help deliver care for everything from mental health to health for that aching back that I'm sure many of you know all too well.

21:09The company was last valued at$4 billion in June in this year, and it is backed by General Catalyst, Coastal Ventures, Comcast Ventures. I want to bring on Vee Bento, the founder of the company, to talk about how he thinks about his business. Vee, welcome to the show. It's great to have you. Thanks for having me, Akash. It's a pleasure to be here. So tell us a little bit about what your company actually does, and then we'll get into some of the trends. So basically what we are doing is we are, we call it internally, we are building this AI healer that combined with human clinicians allows patients to access much more efficient care at home independently in total convenience, comfort.

21:49And of course, that drives high-quality care. And by enabling high-quality care, that also massively reduces costs for our clients, which are buyers, self-insured employers, and all the organizations that have the job of paying for care, believe it. But they want to get the highest quality of care at the lowest cost possible. Right. And so you are selling technically to the employers and the insurance companies right now? Yes, you can think about SWORD as an AI provider that's care. Got it, got it. And this is everything, like I say, this is everything from muscle aches to mental health appointments.

22:31I mean, just explain to us the range of things that you actually look at. So we had what we call the AI care platform, right? And we started by launching our vertical in 2020, which was focused on physical pain, low back pain, shoulder pain, neck pain, physical pain is the problem with the highest prevalence. Shoulder, neck, eyes. Okay. All right. All the muscle system. In 2022, we launched our women's physical health solution. For example, urinary incontinence after child birth, massive problem in the female population. We have a solution to address that. And afterwards, we launched mental health, longevity.

23:10And now what we want to do is all verticals of care where right now care is delivered in a 100 % labor intensive way. We want to prevent how care is delivered there using AI as the provider of care. And do they actually see a doctor on the digital health platform or is it all just automated care with the AI companion? So it's basically completely independent with the AI care specialist. We call it Phoenix. So you interface with Phoenix, which is our AI test. So there's no doctors involved at all then? So you have the clinician in the loop, but it's basically remotely and asynchronously supervising everything that the patients are doing with Phoenix, acting as checks and balances of the AI system, and also, and this is very important, being there to provide human touch.

23:58And so it's really about how you can have AI working alongside human clinicians so that clinicians are doing the complex, intellectually elevated parts of the job. Right, right. Presumably, you can get access to them if you need to talk to them. Got it. By the way, healthcare is not a one-size-fits-all. We have patients that require that more hand-holding and light-bluff treatment and connect with human clinicians often. And then we have patients that want to do everything almost independently with Phoenix and Home. Right. So it's that. Now, one of the things I wanted to ask you, but I do want to ask sort of about long-term trends for AI and healthcare.

24:39But, you know, we had Hemant Deneja, the CEO of General Catalyst on the show just yesterday. And I know they're a big backer of yours. And we were talking about the hospital acquisition that they did. And I asked him about what the broader strategy was for General Catalyst. And he said, you know, it's all in service of our founders and helping them get the support that they need. and you are a healthcare-focused company. Have you been able to leverage that hospital acquisition that they made at General Catalyst? What kind of support has that offered you? Just talk to us about that. Yeah, so the ecosystem at GC has been very important to us.

25:16The partnership with the hospitals, it's something that is starting now, so that partnership is still in the early stages for us. But the product ecosystem that GC has, not just in terms of infrastructure, but also in terms of network, it's been very fruitful for us. And so do you imagine yourself talking to this hospital chain, you know, asking them questions about best practices or, you know, maybe even leveraging their talent network? How do you see them sort of helping you tactically? So tactically more as a designed partner for us to launch new AI care verticals, more in that sense. Got it.

25:56So like maybe like a pilot partner, like you would pilot new tools with their patients. If you want to expand into the GI space or in the cardiac space, for example, it's good to have design partners. And also for clinical studies is also something that is, it's important to have partners like that in the more traditional world. Now, we saw Hinge Health going public earlier this year. You guys just raised money at$4 billion valuation. Are you looking to go public in the next year? Not in the next year, no. How about the year after that? Probably not, but who knows? Everything slips on a dime on this space, and it moves very, very fast.