Vineeta Agarwala, the wife of Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, is now making headlines amid Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover deal.
Her role as a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) — a top US VC firm that has agreed to pay $400 million as part of Musk’s new $7.1 billion financing commitments — is set to create a conflict of interest.
As a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, she leads investments for the firm’s bio and health fund across therapeutics, life sciences tools/diagnostics, and digital health, with a focus on companies leveraging unique datasets to improve drug development and patient care delivery.
Andreessen Horowitz is also one of the biggest backers of Facebook (now Meta).
Prior to joining a16z, Vineeta held many different roles in the healthcare space.
She was a physician taking care of patients, an operator at health tech startups, and a venture investor on the Google Ventures life sciences team.
She was an early data scientist at Kyruus, a management consultant for biotech, pharmaceutical, and medical device clients at McKinsey & Co; and a director of product management at Flatiron Health.
She has collaborated with academic researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Broad Institute, where she did graduate work in computational biology and human genetics.
Vineeta holds a Bachelor of Science in biophysics from Stanford University and an MD and Ph.D. degree from Harvard Medical School/MIT.
She continues to see patients at Stanford as an adjunct clinical professor in the Division of Primary Care and Population Health.
Vineeta serves on a number of portfolio company boards, including BigHat Biosciences, GC Therapeutics, Memora Health, Thyme Care, Pearl Health, and Waymark.
Parag studied BTech in Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay and completed his Ph.D. from Stanford University.
They have a son named Ansh and the couple is based in San Francisco, California.
Meanwhile, there are doubts over Parag’s future once Musk takes over, as the Tesla CEO himself can become a temporary CEO of the platform. According to reports, Musk may have also lined up a new Twitter CEO.
Parag is likely to receive nearly $39 million due to a clause in his contract once he leaves Twitter. His total compensation for 2021 was $30.4 million, largely in stocks.