Michael Dell and Jim Breyer back startup Harbor Health

A version of this article first appeared in CNBC’s Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide for the high-net-worth investor and consumer. subscription To receive future issues, directly 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.

The hard part wasn’t improving treatment outcomes at a lower cost, he told CNBC. The sticking point, he said, is getting insurance companies to pay for it.

So, in 2021, he left medical school with Dell’s blessing to launch the startup Harbor Health Clinic. The company, headquartered in Austin, Texas, is a “prepaid” company that offers its own insurance plans and owns and operates 43 primary care and specialty care clinics in four metro centers in Texas.

Dell’s family office, DFO Management, has supported Harbor since its inception.

“Michael was passionate about what we had built at the School of Medicine, and he understood the limitations of that,” said Johnston, who serves as chief medical officer at Harbor Health.

In September, Harbor raised $130 million from DFO Side by Side Jim Breyer’s namesake venture capital firm, family office Martin Ventures and others to expand a chain of primary care clinics in Texas and expand its insurance business. Harbor has raised $258 million since launching in 2022.

Owning clinics and an insurance company requires a huge war chest, but it’s necessary, said Johnston, the neurologist and epidemiologist.

“The reason we do this is to have complete control over the dollars, so we can take responsibility for people’s health and use those dollars for whatever makes sense for people to get better health outcomes,” he explained. “We can push technologies, and we don’t have to focus on traffic.”

Johnston also knew Breyer and Charlie Martin, director of Martin Ventures, from his work at Dell University School of Medicine. Both have been supporters since the early days of Harbor Harbor.

Martin, a serial CEO of hospital operators, supports companies focused on improving patient outcomes and healthcare costs. Johnston said Breyer was drawn to applications of artificial intelligence in health care at the School of Medicine and at Harbor.

“He brings people together, and he has great visions, especially about technology and how it will evolve,” Johnston said of Breyer.

Harbor analyzes medical data to predict the costs of patient care and whether a patient is at high risk of developing a particular condition, requiring surgery, or needing to be hospitalized. The AI ​​analysis enables Harbor to provide more care to patients before their condition worsens, according to Johnston.

While family office deal-making has declined significantly in 2025, healthcare is one of the few sectors that is still gaining attention. A recent survey of family offices by Goldman Sachs found that 28% of family offices plan to be overweight in healthcare over the next 12 months and that only 10% intend to be underweight, the best metrics for 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 fundraising for the medical school bears many similarities to selling investors on Harbor Health’s vision.

“The people you’re selling to on the project side are mostly looking at the financial potential for return,” he said. “It’s good to have an ambitious vision that is potentially more disruptive and has the potential to deliver financial rewards, but it stops there.” “The execution piece becomes more important.”