The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch - 20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner
Fred Turner, co-founder and CEO of Curative, shares an extraordinary entrepreneurial journey marked by dramatic pivots and rapid scaling, now culminating in a health insurance provider valued at $1.3 billion. His story begins in the UK, where he, at 19, realized Silicon Valley offered a unique environment for young founders, unlike the credential-focused investment landscape he found at home.
Turner's first venture, TL Biolabs (later Shield), initially focused on sequencing dairy and beef cows for trait prediction. Despite raising seed funding from Andreessen, the limited "cow TAM" forced a pivot into human diagnostics, first with at-home STD testing and then into sepsis detection. Despite promising technology, the sepsis company ultimately failed when a strategic Series B investor pulled out due to competitive concerns. Turner reflects on this failure as a valuable learning experience, making it easier to build a company the second time around, though he humorously notes selling a crucial lab license for $150,000 only to buy a similar one for $27 million five months later due to timing.
In late 2019, Turner started Curative with an initial focus on revolutionizing sepsis treatment through mini-hospitals within existing facilities. However, the burgeoning COVID-19 pandemic quickly shifted their course. With a COVID test already developed by their chief scientific officer, Curative pivoted entirely. From a starting point of zero, the company scaled to test 206,000 people in a single day by December 2020 and grew from 7 to 7,000 employees in just nine months. This was fueled by an "orthogonal supply chain" strategy, which avoided existing bottlenecks by sourcing unconventional materials. Curative generated approximately $5 billion in revenue over three years, becoming the largest non-LabCorp/Quest testing provider. While profitable during surges, the high fixed costs meant losing money during pandemic lulls. They also administered 2.5 million vaccinations, a "terrible business" that lost money due to insufficient government reimbursement, but was undertaken as a service to partners.
Always aware of the temporary nature of the COVID boom, Curative began planning its next chapter in mid-2020. After exploring lab testing and hospital acquisitions, Turner realized that the payer (health insurance companies) held the true leverage in the US healthcare system. They invested about $500 million of their COVID profits into building a new health insurance company. Turner notes the inefficiency of the US system, where consolidation among both payers and providers leads to inflated costs and poor negotiation dynamics, wishing for more competition among smaller entities.
A significant revelation since pivoting to health insurance has been the transformative power of AI. Turner admits they didn't foresee the current wave of LLMs when they started. AI is now fundamentally reshaping their operations:
* **Credentialing:** An AI agent powered by Claude reduced the time to credential a doctor from 2-3 months and $50 to 12 hours and 20 cents.
* **Underwriting:** Models write Python scripts to normalize diverse incoming data formats (PDFs, spreadsheets), replacing manual labor.
* **Network Contracting:** An AI agent named "Gwen" handles email negotiations for provider contracts, increasing output from 100 contracts per week (by 45 staff) to 3,500 in eight weeks, at a fraction of the cost ($70 vs $1500-2000 per contract). This frees the human team to focus on larger, more complex, relationship-driven deals.
Turner emphatically believes "SaaS is dead" for many use cases, citing Curative's plan to cut 80% of its SaaS spend this year, including a $600,000 Salesforce contract replaced by an internal "vibe-coded" solution built in two months. He projects that AI models like Anthropic could become $10 trillion companies, and even a 5x price increase wouldn't deter their usage due to the sheer efficiency gains. While acknowledging potential job displacement in back-office roles, he believes new roles like "agent supervisor" will emerge, and humans will focus on technical skills and relationship-building.
Beyond Curative, Turner has co-founded Subcritical, a nuclear fission company with his wife. He sees nuclear energy as safe and scalable, with regulatory hurdles, not engineering, being the primary challenge. Subcritical's "energy amplifier" design, operating below criticality, offers inherent safety advantages.
Turner's personal philosophy includes investing in people he knows and seeking diverse perspectives to solve problems. He humorously recounts sharing genome files with his now-wife before their second date to ensure compatibility. He advises having children early, citing the energy and lack of sleep as ideal conditions for parenthood.