Artificial intelligence (AI) startup OpenEvidence, touted as the “ChatGPT for doctors,” has raised $210 million in a Series B funding round, elevating its valuation to $3.5 billion. The startup has developed an AI-powered medical search engine and generative AI chatbot exclusively for doctors that summarizes and simplifies evidence-based medical information.

The funding round was co-led by Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins, while other investors include Sequoia Capital — which led the startup’s $75 million Series A funding round earlier this year — as well as Coatue, Conviction and Thrive. This funding round also helped Co-Founder and CEO Daniel Nadler reach billionaire status.

Founded in 2022, OpenEvidence claims to be the most widely used medical search engine among U.S. clinicians, with more than 40% of physicians using the platform.

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Nadler says he founded OpenEvidence in an attempt to make online research easier for physicians. “We talk about the golden age of biotechnology where there are new drugs and better drugs developed all the time. But it is like the dark ages for physicians because of burnout,” he told Forbes. “There is this enormous firehose of information they need to stay on top of, and the human brain is limited in its capacity to read millions of studies.”

Nadler, who has a PhD from Harvard, sold his previous company back in 2018 for $550 million, and set out to solve the problem using AI. The startup’s proprietary algorithms search millions of peer-reviewed publications, including in top journals like the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association, to help doctors find the best answers fast, with full citations to papers so doctors can read more for themselves. The software is free for verified doctors to use and makes money through advertising — much like Google does.

John Doerr, the chairman of Kleiner Perkins, who invested in OpenEvidence through his firm as well as personally, said the startup looks like it’s going to be “for healthcare what Google was for the internet.”

“It’s the free-for-physician model, that’s the magic here,” he added.

OpenEvidence states its platform has seen a 2,000%-plus year-over-year growth rate. In July of 2024, OpenEvidence supported approximately 358,000 physician consultations in one month.

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One year later, the company now handles that many each workday, and supports over 8,500,000 clinical consultations by physicians per month, according to OpenEvidence executives. Nadler also said the company offers its chatbot to physicians for free and the product has grown organically through word of mouth between doctors.

OpenEvidence has formed strategic content partnerships with the American Medical Association, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and all eleven JAMA specialty journals—such as JAMA Oncology and JAMA Neurology. Nadler also claims the company had also strategically differentiated itself from other medical chatbots by being an early mover, collecting tens of millions of clinical consultations, and through its content partnerships with medical journals that represent the gold standards of medical knowledge.

OpenEvidence isn’t the only company that helps physicians make sense of the overload of medical publications. Wolters Kluwer’s UpToDate, which offers a similar service has been around for decades, and has recently started incorporating AI. However, it is the first to build software that integrates AI from the start to make it easier for doctors to find answers to pressing clinical questions, and it reportedly does so more accurately than ChatGPT.

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