Dr. Clay Johnston, co-founder and chief medical officer of Harbor Health.
Courtesy of Harbor Health
A version of this article first appeared in CNBC’s Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide to the high-net-worth investor and consumer. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.
When tech founder Michael Dell and his wife Susan founded their namesake medical school at the University of Texas at Austin, their mission was to promote value-based health care, a model that rewards providers for better patient outcomes.
Dr. Clay Johnston, the first dean of Dell Medical School, later learned the hard part wasn’t improving treatment outcomes and at a lower cost, he told CNBC. The sticking point was getting insurance providers to pay for it, he said.
So in 2021, he left the medical school with Dell’s blessing to launch clinic startup Harbor Health. The company, based in Austin, Texas, is a “pay-vider” that offers its own insurance plans and owns and operates 43 primary care and specialty care clinics in four metro hubs in Texas.
Dell’s family office, DFO Management, has backed Harbor since its inception.
“Michael was excited about what we had built at the medical school, and he understood the limitations of that,” said Johnston, who serves as Harbor Health’s chief medical officer.
In September, Harbor raised $130 million from DFO alongside Jim Breyer’s namesake venture capital firm, family office Martin Ventures and others to expand its chain of primary care clinics in Texas and expand its insurance business. Harbor has raised $258 million since launching in 2022.
Owning clinics and the insurance company requires a massive war chest, but it’s necessary, said Johnston, a neurologist and epidemiologist.
“The reason we do that is so that we have full control of the dollars, so that we can take responsibility for people’s health and use those dollars for whatever makes sense for people to have better health outcomes,” he explained. “We can push technologies, and we don’t have to be focused on on visits.”
Johnston also knew Breyer and Charlie Martin, principal of Martin Ventures, from his work at Dell Medical School. Both have been backers since Harbor’s early days.
Martin, a serial CEO of hospital operators, backs firms focused on improving patient outcomes and healthcare costs. Breyer was drawn to the applications of artificial intelligence in healthcare at the medical school and at Harbor, Johnston said.
“He just brings people together, and he has wonderful insights, particularly about technology and how it’s going to evolve,” Johnston said of Breyer.
Harbor analyzes medical data to predict patient care costs and whether a patient is at high risk of developing a specific condition, requiring a surgery or needing hospitalization. This AI analysis enables Harbor to provide more care to patients before their condition worsens, according to Johnston.
While family office deal-making has declined markedly in 2025, healthcare is one of the few sectors still garnering interest. A recent family office survey by Goldman Sachs found that 28% of family offices planned to be overweight healthcare over the next 12 months and only 10% intended to be underweight, the best metrics of any sector other than technology.
Johnston said the capital-intensive nature of health care can be “hard to stomach” for some investors, but he said his experience with raising donations for the medical school bears many similarities to selling investors on the vision for Harbor Health.
“The people you’re selling to on the venture side are mostly looking at the financial likelihood of return. It’s nice to have an ambitious vision that’s potentially more disruptive and has the potential to to yield financial rewards, but it stops there,” he said. “The execution piece becomes more important.”
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/30/michael-dell-jim-breyer-back-startup-harbor-health.html
