Tag: openevidence

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.

OpenEvidence might be the new kid on the medical chatbot block, but it’s already “the fastest-growing platform for doctors in history,” and $75M of Series A funding just made it the youngest unicorn in healthcare.

Founder Daniel Nadler describes OpenEvidence as an AI copilot, with an experience that feels similar to ChatGPT yet is actually a “very different organism” due to the data it was trained on.

OpenEvidence functions as a specialized medical search engine that helps clinicians make decisions at the point of care, turning natural language queries into structured answers with detailed citations.

• The model was purpose-built for healthcare by exclusively using training data from strategic partners like the New England Journal of Medicine – no internet forums or Reddit threads in sight.

• The kicker? It’s available at no cost to verified physicians and generates its revenue through advertising. 

Happy users are their own growth strategy, and OpenEvidence claims that 25% of doctors in the U.S. have already used the product since its launch in 2023. It’s also adding 40k new doctors each month through word-of-mouth referrals and glowing reviews of its ability to:

• Handle complex case-based prompts
• Address clinical cases holistically
• Provide really good references

The 1,000 pound gorilla in this space is Wolters Kluwer and its UpToDate clinical evidence engine. 

• Although Wolters Kluwer has been inking partnerships with companies like Corti and Abridge to bring new AI capabilities to UpToDate, OpenEvidence is built from the ground up as an AI-first solution.

• If WoltersKluwer is an encyclopedia, OpenEvidence is ChatGPT, and it’ll be interesting to watch the plays that both sides make as they battle for market share.

The Takeaway

OpenEvidence isn’t a solution in search of a problem, it’s a sleek new tool addressing an immediate need for plenty of providers. It’s rare to see the type of viral adoption that OpenEvidence managed to generate, which is a good reminder that many areas of healthcare change slowly… then all at once.