OpenEvidence, ‘ChatGPT for doctors,’ doubles valuation to $12 billion
A startup commonly known as “ChatGPT for Doctors” has raised a new round of funding valuing the company at $12 billion.
OpenEvidence, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, closed $250 million in financing led by Thrive Capital and DST, the company told CNBC. The startup first raised outside capital in February, raising $75 million from Sequoia at a $1 billion valuation, after which its valuation rose to $1 billion. 6 billion dollars in October.
OpenEvidence has raised $700 million from investors in less than a year. Google’s enterprise arm, NvidiaKleiner Perkins, David Sacks’ Craft Ventures, and Mayo Clinic.
The company was founded in 2022 by Daniel Nadler, who previously founded Kensho Technologies, an artificial intelligence company. acquired It was purchased by Standard & Poor’s in 2018 for about $700 million, Nadler said in an interview. Nadler’s newest venture provides a chatbot for doctors, and he said its AI models are trained on data and information from top scientific journals.
“‘ChatGPT for doctors’ is a useful acronym, but what we really do is help doctors make high-stakes clinical decisions at the point of care,” Nadler said. “They are not trained on the open internet or social media, which can provide low-quality medical information.”
Nadler claimed that OpenEvidence is the most widely used AI platform by doctors in the US, with more than 40% of doctors using the tool. He noted the huge opportunity in healthcare, which accounts for nearly 20% of the U.S. gross domestic product with annual spending of $5 trillion.
“Health care is the largest part of the real economy,” Nadler said. “People realize there can be a lot of winners in this space.”
These names may include OpenAI and Anthropic.
OpenAI launched “ChatGPT Health” earlier this month, while Anthropic launched “Claude healthcareBoth are Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, compliant extensions of popular consumer chatbots.
As competition increases, Nadler said his company’s main goal is to focus on doctors, data quality and first-mover advantage.
“We have already collected hundreds of millions of real-world clinical consultations from verified physicians; this feedback loop is incredibly difficult to replicate,” Nadler said. “Even if someone copied the playbook today, they would still be far behind because it’s not just about partnerships, it’s about real-world usage data.”
rely on advertising
OpenEvidence said annual revenue exceeded $100 million last year, driven mostly by organic growth. Nadler said 95% of new users heard about OpenEvidence from another doctor.
“Most healthcare in America is not provided in billion-dollar hospitals in New York or San Francisco,” Nadler said. “This happens in small practices that don’t have IT departments or budgets for expensive software.”
OpenEvidence was one of the first AI startups to rely on advertising for revenue, and Nadler said this allowed for faster adoption and broader use compared to a paid subscription model.
Companies can pay for promotions through banner ads, badges, images, videos and other types of content in the OpenEvidence app.
OpenEvidence CEO Daniel Nadler.
Courtesy: OpenEvidence
The artificial intelligence industry has started to warm up to advertising-based revenues. OpenAI last week It said it was testing an ad-supported version of ChatGPT. Nadler said he’s trying to be more disciplined than some companies that “clearly plan to burn billions or tens of billions of dollars over the next few years.”
“This is a big, very risky bet,” Nadler said, adding that OpenEvidence is trying to balance growth with bottom line profitability. “We’re not running this like a private equity portfolio company, but we’re not planning on burning billions of dollars next year.”
Artificial intelligence initiatives this year pick up where they left off in 2025.
According to CB Insights, there were six AI funding rounds worth over $1 billion in the third quarter of last year. Anthropic is in talks to raise an additional $10 billion as of January, while Elon Musk’s xAI announced this month that it had raised $20 billion.
Nadler said he felt pressure as big tech companies aggressively pursued acquisitions in the space, but remained committed to building OpenEvidence as an independent company.
“I’ve done the acquisition route before,” he said. “It could be great. But this time I want to build something that will stick around for many years to come.”
As for initial public offerings, he said SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic, which are said to be potential 2026 candidates, should go public first.
“Nature has an order,” Nadler said. “The founding model is that companies go public first. Then comes the application layer. That’s how the Internet evolved, and that’s how this cycle will work.”
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