What happens when someone who’s built startups in Nairobi, invested across emerging markets, and wrestled with US healthcare inefficiencies decides to sit on the other side of the table?

You get a very different kind of venture capitalist.

Emily Durfee is Director of Corporate Venture Capital at Healthworx, the innovation and investment arm of CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield. She backs health tech companies from seed through Series B, but her real edge isn’t capital, it’s pattern recognition across systems that were never designed to work together.

In this episode, Emily unpacks how payer-backed venture actually works, why most founders misunderstand it, and what it really takes to sell into one of the most complex markets on earth. From growing up abroad in South Africa and Israel to investing in healthcare across Sub-Saharan Africa and the US, her worldview is shaped by one recurring question, how do you create value for business without losing sight of humans?

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

00:01 Welcome & Emily’s Role at Healthworx

02:00 Global Upbringing & Early Influences

05:15 Entering Healthcare Through Clover Health

08:30 Healthworx Investment Mandate & Check Sizes

10:45 What Payer-Backed VC Actually Means

14:30 Advantages of Corporate Venture Capital

17:45 Startup Speed vs Healthcare Bureaucracy

20:10 Payer vs Provider Incentives

23:40 Medical Loss Ratio & Profit Caps Explained

26:30 Value-Based Care & Risk Sharing

29:10 Transparency & Data Fragmentation in Healthcare

31:45 How Healthworx Evaluates Startups

34:30 Portfolio Spotlights: Positive Development, SafeRide, Kalina

38:00 Market Headwinds & Why Healthcare Is Contracting

41:00 AI in Healthcare: Hype vs Reality

44:30 The Future of Healthcare Innovation

Along the way, Emily shares hard-earned lessons on navigating bureaucracy without getting crushed by it, building trust across wildly different incentives, and why transparency, not technology, is the real bottleneck in healthcare.

This is a conversation about power, incentives, and patience. And about why the future of healthcare innovation might depend less on breakthrough science, and more on unglamorous systems actually talking to each other.

Pull quotes:

“Just because a new technology exists doesn’t mean healthcare adopts it. We still run on faxes.”

“If you don’t have a payer angle now or in the future, we’re probably not the right partner, not because we don’t like you, but because we can’t help you.”

Emily started her career building in emerging markets. Today, she’s helping founders navigate one of the most entrenched systems in the world. Same skill set, different maze.

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