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Cohort 1: Closed

We empower founders

For exceptional early-career, AI-native builders exploring healthcare entrepreneurship.
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From healthcare-curious to launch-ready
Redesign Spark is a five-week intensive program designed for exceptional early-career, AI-native builders who want to pursue healthcare entrepreneurship in a rigorous and supportive environment. Redesign Spark helps you build conviction from −1 to 0, moving from exploration to a launch-ready thesis that you'll pitch for potential funding.
Our Unfair Advantages = Your Unfair Advantages
  • Hands-on mentorship from Redesign leaders
  • Office hours with our team of healthcare experts, former founders, and leading technologists
  • Templates, playbooks, and internally developed AI research tools that leverage our 7+ years of experience backing founders
  • Select introductions to Redesign's advisors and partners for real-world insights
Structured path from −1 → 0
  • Problem validation → identify real, urgent issues worth solving
  • Solution exploration → design high-value, AI-native solution with differentiating capabilities
  • GTM strategy → define target customer segments and potential business models
  • Pitch prep → build your startup and founder narrative
Investment Committee Pitch
  • Pitch the Redesign Health Investment Committee (IC) for potential investment
  • Guaranteed comprehensive feedback on your idea and pitch
Community
  • Learn from other passionate founders in the program who are also on a journey to transform healthcare
  • Optional: work from our NYC office with our team and founders

Early-career, AI-native builders

Redesign Spark is designed for the brightest minds who see how AI can unlock solutions to healthcare's toughest problems, and who are ready to turn that insight into impact.
A good fit if you are
A builder with fewer than five years of work experience in techAI-obsessed and eager to build fastPassionate about improving the most important part of people's lives
Two ways to participate
Pre-Idea Explorers
Start from scratch by exploring Redesign's curated opportunity zones through personalized mentorship.
Own Idea Builders
Sharpen an existing idea with Redesign operators.
Line chart showing temperature anomalies in the Arctic from 1900 to 2020 with different color lines above the zero anomaly baseline indicating rising temperatures and trends over time.

A five-week sprint, from idea to build to pitch

Weekly check-ins, office hours, and candid feedback from Redesign operators.
Kickoff (NYC)
Week 1
March 18–19, 2026
  • Take a deep dive into our methodology, learnings, successes, and failures from backing exceptional founders in healthcare
  • Define your thesis, key questions, and research plan
  • Engage with your peers
Build and Validate
Weeks 2–4
March 23–April 10, 2026
  • Validate the problem
  • Design your solution
  • Develop your business model and customer strategy
  • Build your founder and startup narrative
Final Pitch
Week 5
April 16, 2026
  • Present your thesis and plan
  • Receive comprehensive feedback

Mentorship comes first

Weekly check-ins, office hours, and candid feedback from Redesign operators.

Aron Szanto
Head of Technology & AI

Aron Szanto

About

Aron leads technology and AI investments, operations, and product development at Redesign Health and across the portfolio. At PathAI and Kensho, he built AI platforms worth over $1B that continue to shape workflows for hundreds of thousands of experts in cancer diagnostics, financial analysis, and counterterrorism. Before joining Redesign, Aron led technology and AI for the world's foremost clinical trial in Parkinson's disease. He held research and teaching positions at Harvard University, where he studied mathematics, computational economics, and philosophy, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with highest honors. His graduate research introduced the first machine learning technique for detecting disinformation on social networks and was awarded the Fay Prize for the most outstanding work at Harvard in any field. Aron is an active concert cellist and performs and records with ensembles worldwide.

Kienan O'Brien
Director, New Ventures

Kienan O'Brien

About

Kienan is a Director on the New Ventures team at Redesign Health. Kienan's passion for solving healthcare's toughest problems has led him to work deeply with Redesign's partner organizations. Previously, Kienan helped lead the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s internal accelerator investing in novel clinical and translational research programs after starting his career as a management consultant at Accenture. Kienan holds an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania and a BS from Boston College.

Neil Patel
Head of Investing

Neil Patel

About

Neil is the Head of Investing at Redesign Health. With nearly 20 years in the healthcare industry, Neil brings extensive experience as an operator, consultant, and early-stage investor. Previously, Neil was the Head of Partner Strategy and Solutions for AWS Healthcare after serving as CEO of Healthbox and leading its turnaround and sale to HIMSS. Neil holds an MBA from Northwestern University and a BS in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

Patrick McDonagh
Managing Director, New Ventures

Patrick McDonagh

About

Patrick is a Managing Director of New Ventures at Redesign Health. His 15 year healthcare career spans investing, strategic partnerships, corporate strategy, and consulting. Prior to Redesign, Patrick oversaw Labcorp’s corporate venture fund, where he deployed ~$20M annually and managed $100M+ capital at work across 30+ portfolio companies. Patrick began his career as a life sciences strategy consultant at Putnam, focused on drug development and commercialization. Patrick holds an MBA from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and a B.S. in Chemistry from Duke University.

Preston Tollinger
Vice President, AI Ventures

Preston Tollinger

About

Preston Tollinger is VP of Technology, AI Ventures at Redesign Health, where he leads the firm's technical investing practice. A repeat founder and technology leader with more than two decades in software and digital health, Preston has built and scaled products across health insurance, consumer, and civic technology. He was co-founder and CTO of Collective Health, which he helped grow into a leading employer health platform backed by Founders Fund, Google Ventures, and NEA, and earlier co-founded Cellfire, a mobile commerce company acquired by Catalina Marketing. Most recently, he served as Chief Product & Technology Officer at Chorus Innovations. Preston holds a BS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and began his career as a research engineer at NASA Ames.

Sarah Cranston
Head of Platform

Sarah Cranston

About

Sarah is the Head of Platform at Redesign Health, where she leads firm-wide operational excellence and co-leads the venture capital business. She previously worked at Andela, guiding the organization through a major transformation into a global talent marketplace, and at Medallia, where she led talent development and strategy and partnered with enterprise clients to shape their customer experience strategies. Sarah began her career in management consulting at Deloitte. She holds a Bachelor of Law in Law and French from the University of Leeds, including a year at Université Toulouse Capitole, and is a certified coach.

Samantha Lynch
Head of Strategy & Finance

Samantha Lynch

About

Samantha is the Head of Strategy and Finance at Redesign Health. She has twenty years of experience identifying growth opportunities for technology, e-commerce, and media businesses, coupled with deep fundraising and mergers and acquisitions experience. Samantha spent five years at Compass, leading corporate development, investor relations, and strategic finance. She raised over $1B in funding, driving the valuation from $800M to over $6B, closed fifteen acquisitions, and launched agent and seller loan programs. Before that, Samantha was an early-stage venture investor at BBG Capital, a strategy consultant at Activate, a member of the corporate development team at News Corporation, and an analyst at Goldman Sachs. She graduated magna cum laude from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and received an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Tom Skiba
Head of Founder Strategy

Tom Skiba

About

Tom is the Head of Founder Strategy at Redesign Health. Tom is an organizational psychologist and talent analytics expert with over a decade of experience building applied behavioral science products and workforce assessments. Previously, Tom was the VP of People Strategy at Morning Consult and a lead People Scientist at Humu (Acquired). Tom holds a Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from the Florida Institute of Technology.

Applications for Cohort 1 are now closed
Stay tuned for updates
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