OpenEvidence is getting into the drug development business, and it raised some uncharacteristically quiet funding to back the move.
The right partners make anything possible. OpenEvidence announced a partnership with Memorial Sloan Kettering that looks a lot like its other content deals.
- MSK is integrating OpenEvidence into its Epic workflows (70% of its faculty were already using it), and OpenEvidence will distribute MSK’s OncoKB precision oncology database to clinicians everywhere else.
The article buried the lede. Tucked into the bottom of a paragraph – as a post-publication update, no less – was the news that OpenEvidence quietly raised $250M at a $15B valuation last week, led by a16z and Byers Capital. For context:
- January: $250M at $12B, with a press release and a CNBC tour for CEO Daniel Nadler
- July: The Information reported OpenEvidence was weighing $200M at $20B but likely wouldn’t proceed due to dilution
- September: $250M at $15B, disclosed in one sentence of someone else’s story
Depending on the anchor, that’s either a 25% step up or a 25% haircut. The silence suggests which one OpenEvidence is going with.
It gets weirder. Nadler told Forbes that OpenEvidence plans to develop its own oncology therapies, with a first drug entering clinical trials before year-end and another three to five candidates next year, starting with rare cancers.
- OpenEvidence won’t compete with Lilly or Pfizer on 10,000-patient trials, and will instead go after “the stuff that they are not doing, and maybe can’t do,” since reaching most U.S. physicians makes it easier to find the handful of patients a rare disease trial needs.
Meanwhile, competition keeps compounding. Doximity’s latest earnings call featured AI search queries up 25% quarter-over-quarter and Scribe users up 10x in July. Health systems seem to want an enterprise-grade offering, and MSK itself is one of eight piloting OpenAI’s enterprise tools.
The Takeaway
Companies with real momentum don’t usually take money below a number they floated two months earlier, then pivot into drug development in the same breath. The generous read is that Nadler sees a rare disease recruiting edge pharma can’t replicate. The less generous read is that ad-supported clinical search is finding its ceiling, and AI drug discovery is the shiniest narrative on the shelf.
