OpenEvidence might just be the hottest startup in healthcare after locking in another $210M of Series B funding and tripling its valuation to a whopping $3.5B.
Déjà vu. If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because OpenEvidence first joined the unicorn club just five short months ago when it notched a $1B valuation through its $75M Series A.
- Since then, the LLM-powered medical search engine inked a multi-year content agreement with JAMA to bring full-text articles directly to its platform, and continued to add new doctors at the breakneck pace of 65k per month.
- It turns out that getting doctors to use a sleek new AI tool isn’t the hardest thing in the world when you make it available at no cost, and over 40% of doctors in the U.S. apparently don’t mind a few pharma ads if you can make their job easier.
Does that justify the valuation? Depends what physician trust is worth. OpenEvidence has added over 430k verified physicians since launching in 2023, and they’re now supporting over 8.5M clinical consultations every month.
- The volume of medical research published annually is doubling every five years, and physicians are flocking to OpenEvidence so that they can search once, skip the scavenger hunt, and surface the science in seconds.
- That type of growth is nearly unprecedented in healthcare, and investors are looking to capitalize by dogpiling into startups like OpenEvidence and Abridge, which also raised back-to-back megarounds in the first half of the year.
OpenEvidence is only ramping up from here. CEO Daniel Nadler told Forbes that he views the commoditization of AI copilots similar to TV streaming services, which have to differentiate around content and partnerships.
- The Series B funds will help OpenEvidence add more strategic content to its medical knowledge library, and fuel new products that can take advantage of it – including its new DeepConsult research assistant.
- DeepConsult helps physicians get up to speed on a topic by cross-referencing hundreds of studies to deliver comprehensive Ph.D.-level research reports in a matter of hours.
The Takeaway
OpenEvidence is off to the races, and “the fastest-growing platform for doctors in history” still hasn’t even started charging doctors to use it.
