The round
OpenEvidence has raised $250 million at a $15 billion valuation, Axios reported on Friday. Business Insider reported the round was led by hospital systems and Andreessen Horowitz.
That is up from $12 billion in January, when the company raised another $250 million. It has now taken more than $1 billion in a year from a list that includes Thrive Capital, DST, GV, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital and Nvidia. The cadence is as notable as the number.
Founded in 2022 by Daniel Nadler and Zachary Ziegler, the company built an AI clinical search tool for physicians looking for and interpreting medical evidence — it describes itself as the fastest-growing application for physicians in history, which is the company’s own characterisation rather than an independent finding.
The part that is not search
Nadler told Forbes that OpenEvidence intends to use data from its Memorial Sloan Kettering relationship, together with an earlier agreement with the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, to build its own pipeline of potential therapies. He said the first drug should enter clinical trials before the end of 2026, with another three to five candidates next year, and rare cancers among the initial targets.
That is a different company from the one investors backed in January. Clinical search is software with software margins and a short feedback loop. Drug development is a decade-long, capital-intensive business with a failure rate to match, and the fact that a model surfaced a hypothesis does not shorten a phase II trial.
What the MSK deal actually does
The partnership announced last week integrates OpenEvidence into Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Epic workflow, and brings MSK’s OncoKB precision oncology knowledge base into OpenEvidence, so physicians outside the cancer centre get its interpretation of cancer-related genetic alterations.
“Precision oncology has produced an extraordinary amount of knowledge, but that knowledge only helps a patient if the right interpretation reaches the physician at the moment a decision is being made,” OpenEvidence chief medical officer Travis Zack said in the announcement.
That is the distribution argument, and it is the same asset the drug pipeline depends on: being inside the moment of decision is how the company sees what is being decided.
Competitors as partners
This week OpenEvidence also announced a partnership with Anthropic to provide clinical decision support to physicians in nearly 100 low- and middle-income countries. “Access to medical knowledge shouldn’t depend on geography,” Nadler said.
Anthropic and OpenAI are both pushing further into healthcare, which makes that an alliance with a firm that could as easily be a competitor. OpenEvidence’s answer, for now, is to work with them.
What to watch
The concrete test is the one Nadler set himself: a drug in the clinic before the end of this year, roughly three months from now. An investigational new drug application filed and accepted is the checkable event. Until then the $15 billion is priced on a search product and a stated intention.
