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 for wealthy investors and consumers. Register to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.
When tech founder Michael Dell and his wife Susan founded their eponymous 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, Dell Medical School’s first dean, later learned that the hardest part was not improving treatment outcomes and at lower cost, he told CNBC. The tricky part was getting insurers to pay, he said.
So in 2021, he left medical school with Dell’s blessing to launch the clinical startup Harbor Health. The company, based in Austin, Texas, is a pay-as-you-go provider that offers its own insurance plans and owns and operates 43 primary care and specialty care clinics in four Texas metropolitan hubs.
Dell’s family office, DFO Management, has supported Harbor since its inception.
“Michael was excited about what we had built at the medical school and he understood the limitations,” said Johnston, who is Harbor Health’s chief medical officer.
In September, Harbor raised $130 million from DFO alongside Jim Breyer’s eponymous 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 its 2022 launch.
Owning clinics and an insurance company requires a huge war chest, but it’s necessary, said Johnston, a neurologist and epidemiologist.
“The reason we do this is to have complete control over the money, so 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 advance technologies and we don’t need to focus on visits.”
Johnston also knew Breyer and Charlie Martin, principal of Martin Ventures, through his work at Dell Medical School. Both have supported Harbor since the beginning.
Martin, a serial CEO of hospital operators, supports companies focused on improving patient outcomes and healthcare costs. Breyer was drawn to applications of artificial intelligence in health care at the medical school and at Harbor, Johnston said.
“He just brings people together and he has wonderful ideas, especially about technology and how it’s going to evolve,” Johnston said of Breyer.
Harbor analyzes medical data to predict patient care costs and determine whether a patient is at high risk of developing a specific disease, requiring surgery or hospitalization. This AI analysis allows Harbor to provide more care to patients before their conditions worsen, according to Johnston.
While deals by family offices have declined significantly in 2025, healthcare is one of the few sectors still attracting interest. A recent Goldman Sachs survey of family offices found that 28% of family offices planned to be overweight healthcare over the next 12 months and only 10% planned to be underweight, the best indicator of any sector other than technology.
Johnston said the capital-intensive nature of health care can be “difficult to stomach” for some investors, but he said his experience raising donations for the medical school has many similarities to selling Harbor Health’s vision to investors.
“The people you sell to on the venture capital side are primarily looking at the financial probability of a return. It’s good to have an ambitious vision that is potentially more disruptive and has the potential to generate financial rewards, but it stops there,” he said. “The issue of enforcement becomes more important.”