The DOGE Boys Get VC Funding to Support Their Latest Enterprise

Key points

• members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have launched a startup to, they say, bring “DOGE for the private sector.” Their holding company, called Special, has backing from billionaire Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm a16z and several other former DOGE members.
• In a post on a16z’s Substack, Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox, who led DOGE’s efforts at several government agencies, write that their startup will build “an operating system to transform critical American industries with AI,” and claim that “Main Street,” like the federal government, is inefficient.
• The plan, according to Fox and Cavanaugh, is to “vertically integrate,” buying up businesses in critical sectors and running them using Special’s operating system.
• Their first target is senior care, with a vertical called FigureHealth.
• In an interview on TBPN, Cavanaugh said that Special is also looking at “markets like construction, manufacturing, other very labor intensive, highly regulated markets that a...