Medical chatbot firm OpenEvidence raises $210m
Daniel Nadler, co-founder and chief executive of OpenEvidence.
The company behind a search agent to assist clinical decision-making – OpenEvidence – has raised an impressive $210 million in a second-round financing that will support the launch of a tool that can provide more in-depth responses to doctors.
The Series B, co-led by Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins, will also allow the company to forge new content partnerships with trusted providers, including medical publishers, whose content is used to generate the platform.
The cash injection values the Miami, Florida-based company at around $3.5 billion and brings the total funding raised since its inception in 2021 to more than $300 million, coming after it closed a $75 million first round in February.
Its platform, also called OpenEvidence, already draws on millions of papers and other content published in top-tier journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and is used by physicians to sift through mountains of medical research to keep up to date and help guide diagnosis and treatment plans.
The software is free for healthcare professionals, generating its income from advertising in a similar manner to Google's search engine – a model that has helped drive usage, with recent estimates suggesting 40% of all US doctors have signed up for the service.
Usage has grown more than 2,000% in a year, with logged-in consultations currently running at more than 8.5 million per month, up from 358,000 a year ago.
Daniel Nadler, co-founder and chief executive of OpenEvidence, noted that the volume of medical research published per year is doubling every five years, and the US healthcare system is now facing "the dual challenges of clinician burnout and a projected physician shortfall of nearly 100,000 by 2030."
Part of the new funding is earmarked for the launch of a new service, dubbed DeepConsult, which is described as an artificial intelligence agent that has been purpose-built for physicians and is "capable of conducting advanced medical research while the physician steps away, whether to see the next patient, take a lunch break, or get some rest."
While OpenEvidence is designed to provide answers to queries in a few seconds, DeepConsult can handle more complex questions, delivering a 'PhD-level' research report within an hour or so, according to the company.
"When physicians' lives are hard, patients' lives are harder," said Nadler. "OpenEvidence's commitment to building an AI copilot for clinicians is rooted in the belief that AI will be a force for good in the world, ultimately benefitting both healthcare professionals and the patients they serve."
Sequoia Capital, which led OpenEvidence's Series A round earlier this year, also participated in the latest round along with Coatue, Conviction, and Thrive.
