Ex-DOGE duo Cavanaugh and Fox raise from a16z for elder care AI

Two former DOGE staffers are now pitching investors that what they tried to do to the federal government, they can do to elder care. The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel reports that Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox, who led the Small Agencies team inside the Department of Government Efficiency for most of 2025, have launched a new AI holding company called Special, with a first vertical called Figure Health aimed at the aging US population.

The pitch is the kind of thing a16z and its co-investors clearly liked. Andreessen Horowitz led an undisclosed round, joined by Steve Davis, Antonio Gracias of Valor Equity Partners, Anthony Armstrong, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, and Palantir's Shyam Sankar. Cavanaugh and Fox describe Special as 'DOGE for the private sector,' a holding company that will buy critical service businesses and run them on a proprietary operating system called SpecialOS, with the claim that the automation savings get redirected into higher nurse pay. Figure Health's first acquisition, in Texas, reportedly serves over 1,400 patients and employs hundreds of nurses, and the company says it will open source all of its Medicare and Medicaid billing claims so the public can see the numbers.

Warzel is openly skeptical, and the skepticism is the part worth weighing. 'Shooters shoot. Builders build. And DOGE alumni make splashy announcements about entering complex industries with scant qualifications,' he writes, raising the question of whether Special, SpecialOS and Figure Health are mostly marketing collateral at this stage. The DOGE track record inside the federal government is the relevant prior, and it was not a story of competent operational delivery.

The honest caveat is that the reporting does not give a funding amount, a valuation, a working demo of SpecialOS, or any independent look at the acquired Texas operator's quality metrics. The open-source billing claim is the one unusually concrete commitment in the launch, and if it ships as promised and machine-readable, it would itself be a useful artifact regardless of what happens to the rest of the holding company.

What is worth watching is whether anyone other than the founders' own circle ends up testing Figure Health's claims in practice: nurses inside the acquired site, state regulators, and reporters who can compare the open-sourced claims to the bills patients actually receive. If 'DOGE for the private sector' is going to mean anything, that is where it will be visible first.