LAS VEGAS, Nev.—Artificial intelligence startup OpenEvidence banked $200 million in series C funding, just three months after it raised $210 million in a series B.
The three-year-old company's valuation hit $6 billion post-series C raise, Daniel Nadler, Ph.D., one of OpenEvidence's founders confirmed to Fierce Healthcare on Monday. OpenEvidence developed an AI-powered medical search engine and generative AI chatbot exclusively for doctors that summarizes and simplifies evidence-based medical information.
The New York Times first reported the series C funding Monday morning.
OpenEvidence has raised nearly $500 million since its founding in 2022. Google Ventures led the round. Existing investors Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Thrive and Coatue backed the series C. New investors BOND (Mary Meeker), Blackstone and Craft also joined the round.
The company offers its chatbot to physicians for free, and the product has grown organically through word of mouth between doctors, Nadler said.
OpenEvidence plans to use the fresh funding to continue building out its AI technology.
"AI is expensive. Training new medical AI models—including search, ranking, retrieval, and clinical-trial-matching models—demands enormous compute resources," Nadler told Fierce Healthcare via email. "Our work spans both natural language processing and computer vision, since we also train proprietary models to interpret and rank figures and tables from scientific papers. Each new generation of models compounds this cost, reflecting the true price of developing medical superintelligence."
The startup was launched by Nadler, who previously founded Kensho Technologies, which was sold for $700 million to S&P Global, and Zachary Ziegler, OpenEvidence's chief technology officer, to make it easier for clinicals to access medical and scientific evidence to help with clinical diagnoses.
The company is headquartered in Miami with its main AI research center in San Francisco.
OpenEvidence has formed strategic content partnerships with the American Medical Association, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association and all 11 JAMA specialty journals including JAMA Oncology and JAMA Neurology.
The company has strategically differentiated itself from other medical AI chatbots by being an early mover and collecting tens of millions of clinical consultations as well as through its content partnerships with medical journals that represent the gold standards of medical knowledge, Nadler noted in an interview back in July.
OpenEvidence is seeing explosive growth and is now a widely popular tool among clinicians.
Usage among doctors and nurses in the United States has grown 830% in the past year, Nadler said.
OpenEvidence now supports over 16 million clinical consultations per month, up almost 60% from July when the company announced its series B round. U.S. doctors used OpenEvidence to support roughly 15 million clinical consultations in September alone, Nadler said, pointing out there are only about 1 million doctors in the entire United States.
"This year, more than 100 million Americans will be treated by a doctor using OpenEvidence. No technology in the history of healthcare has been adopted by doctors as quickly as OpenEvidence, other than perhaps Google.com itself," Nadler said.
In July, the company said the technology was actively used across more than 10,000 hospitals and medical centers nationwide. At the time, the company said it was looking to expand its strategic content partnerships to build out its advanced medical knowledge library.
Three months ago, the AI startup released an AI agent purpose-built for physicians for more advanced medical research. Called DeepConsult, the AI agent is a "digital twin of a Ph.D.-level researcher," according to Nadler.
DeepConsult was designed to help physicians ramp up on a new body of knowledge and can provide a comprehensive Ph.D.-level research report, delivered to their inbox, within a matter of hours, the company claims.
The company says it uses trusted source of the highest-quality scientific evidence to inform its answers, giving physicians, medical researchers and healthcare professionals faster access to clinically relevant evidence. The platform rapidly surfaces relevant medical knowledge, synthesizes medical research and gives clinicians the power to make faster, more evidence-based decisions.
OpenEvidence’s core search product is designed for speed—returning evidence-based answers in about 5–10 seconds.