Ex-DOGE staffers launch Special, a holding company bringing government efficiency playbook to private-sector healthcare

Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox are former DOGE staffers building what they describe as the government efficiency playbook applied to the private sector. Their new holding company, Special, acquires and operates labor-intensive main street businesses, starts with proprietary AI tooling, and shares the resulting savings with workers rather than pocketing them as margin.

“We are building effectively Doge but for the private sector. We're focused on this $10,000,000,000,000 main street services economy — massive, inefficient, and in a lot of cases still funded in part by the government. Our first vertical is at-home senior care. We're incubating a new brand called Figure and acquiring great independent small businesses and applying AI tools into those businesses that we will own forever.”

First vertical: at-home senior care

Special's initial target is the US at-home senior care market, where a nurse visits a senior citizen's home to deliver care at lower cost than a facility. Fox estimates roughly 40% of operating costs in these businesses go to administrative tasks that AI can automate, while nursing and direct care account for around 50%. The argument is that redirecting those admin savings into higher worker pay solves a structural problem in the sector: a severe shortage of nurses and caregivers. Pay more than competitors in a given market and workers flood in, which then allows Special to serve more patients.

The newly incubated brand carrying this strategy is called Figure. Its first acquisition, currently under contract, is a Texas-based at-home senior care business generating tens of millions in annual revenue, with roughly 1,500 senior patients and 200 nurses on payroll. That sits in the strike zone Cavanaugh describes as businesses with real management sophistication and scale, but well below the size where a public take-private would make sense.

Financing and backers

The raise is led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from former DOGE colleagues including Steve Davis and Antonio Gracias of Valor Equity Partners. No fund size was disclosed.

Holdco structure and expansion logic

Healthcare is the entry point, not the destination. Fox argues limiting the playbook to one vertical would be too narrow given the size of the main street economy. Cavanaugh flags construction and manufacturing as natural next verticals, both highly regulated and labor-intensive with parallels to the operational patterns they encountered at DOGE.

The central claim is that traditional PE acquirers in these markets extract efficiency gains as margin. Special's pitch is that sharing those gains with workers creates a compounding recruiting and retention advantage that drives growth. Whether that model holds as the portfolio scales is the open question.