Doctors now have their own ChatGPT, and it’s changing healthcare faster than anyone predicted.
In a stunning display of investor confidence in specialized AI applications, OpenEvidence has secured $200 million in Series C funding at a $6 billion valuation. The three-year-old startup, often called “ChatGPT for doctors,” is revolutionizing how physicians access and apply medical knowledge at the point of care.
Why This Matters: The Medical Knowledge Crisis
Every day, thousands of new medical studies are published. For physicians treating patients, staying current with the latest evidence-based research is nearly impossible. The gap between published medical knowledge and clinical practice has been growing for decades, potentially impacting patient outcomes and contributing to physician burnout.
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OpenEvidence is solving this critical problem with AI trained specifically on medical literature, offering doctors instant access to evidence-based answers when they need them most—while treating patients.
Record-Breaking Growth: From Startup to Healthcare Standard
The numbers tell an extraordinary story. OpenEvidence has raised nearly $500 million since its founding in 2022, with its valuation skyrocketing from $3.5 billion to $6 billion in just three months. This 71% jump represents one of the fastest valuation increases in healthcare AI history.
The platform now processes over 15 million clinical consultations monthly—nearly double the usage from July 2025. That translates to roughly 500,000 medical queries every single day, with each one representing a healthcare provider seeking AI-powered insights to improve patient care.
Perhaps most impressively, more than 40% of U.S. physicians now use the platform daily, with the tool actively deployed across over 10,000 hospitals and medical centers nationwide.
Silicon Valley’s Biggest Names Are Betting Big
The Series C round was led by Google Ventures and attracted participation from an all-star roster of venture capital firms:
- Sequoia Capital
- Kleiner Perkins
- Blackstone
- Thrive Capital
- Coatue Management
- Bond
- Craft Ventures
When this caliber of investors—firms behind companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and OpenAI—pile into a single round, it signals something fundamental is shifting in the market. They’re not just backing hype; they’re backing measurable usage and real-world clinical impact.
What Makes OpenEvidence Different
Unlike general-purpose AI chatbots, OpenEvidence is purpose-built for medical professionals. The platform is trained on authoritative medical journals including:
- The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and all 11 JAMA specialty journals
- The New England Journal of Medicine
- Other peer-reviewed medical publications representing the gold standard of medical knowledge
Through strategic content partnerships with these institutions and the American Medical Association, OpenEvidence has differentiated itself by building on verified, high-quality medical knowledge rather than the open web.
The platform works like ChatGPT but for medicine—doctors can ask questions in natural language and receive multi-paragraph answers backed by citations from peer-reviewed research. This allows physicians to quickly access treatment guidelines, understand rare conditions, and verify their clinical reasoning with evidence-based sources in seconds rather than hours.
Free for Doctors: A Bold Business Model
In a departure from traditional medical software that relies on expensive subscriptions, OpenEvidence is completely free for verified healthcare professionals. The company supports its operations through an advertising model focused on medical-professional advertising such as conferences, medical devices, and journal promotions.
This approach has fueled explosive organic growth through word-of-mouth among doctors—a testament to the platform’s genuine clinical utility. As founder Daniel Nadler notes, “No technology in the history of healthcare has been adopted by doctors as quickly as OpenEvidence, other than perhaps Google.com itself.”
The Visionaries Behind the Technology
OpenEvidence was founded in 2022 by Daniel Nadler, Ph.D., and Zachary Ziegler. Nadler previously founded Kensho Technologies, an AI company that S&P Global acquired for $550-700 million, and became a billionaire through OpenEvidence. Ziegler, who serves as CTO, is a machine learning expert who studied under Harvard professor Alexander Rush.
Both founders were personally motivated by healthcare tragedies—Nadler’s grandfather died from a medical error, while Ziegler’s brother-in-law battled leukemia. They recognized that doctors faced the same information overload problem that Nadler had solved in finance: too much data, too little time to process it.
Advanced Features: Beyond Basic Search
OpenEvidence isn’t standing still. The company recently launched DeepConsult, an AI agent described as a “digital twin of a Ph.D.-level researcher.” This advanced tool conducts sophisticated medical research autonomously, allowing physicians to delegate complex evidence synthesis while they focus on patient care.
The platform’s capabilities extend beyond text:
- Natural language processing for medical queries
- Computer vision to interpret figures and tables from scientific papers
- Advanced search, ranking, and retrieval models
- Clinical trial matching algorithms
What’s Next: Global Expansion and Multimodal AI
With the fresh $200 million in funding, OpenEvidence plans to:
- International expansion: Retrain models on local medical journals and languages to serve clinicians in Europe and Asia
- Multimodal capabilities: Develop systems to analyze medical imaging alongside text data
- Advanced AI models: Continue building medical superintelligence through next-generation search and retrieval systems
- Strategic partnerships: Expand content relationships with additional medical journals and institutions
As Nadler explains, “AI is expensive. Training new medical AI models—including search, ranking, retrieval, and clinical-trial-matching models—demands enormous compute resources. Each new generation of models compounds this cost, reflecting the true price of developing medical superintelligence.”
The Competitive Landscape
OpenEvidence is pioneering the clinical decision support AI category, competing against:
- Wolters Kluwer’s UpToDate: The long-standing default for evidence lookup, based on subscription models
- Microsoft: Pushing healthcare AI through partnerships with Epic Systems
- Amazon: Building AWS HealthLake for medical data
- AI documentation startups: Companies like Abridge, Suki, and Nuance focusing on medical transcription
- Hippocratic AI: Developing voice agents for patient interactions
However, OpenEvidence’s focus on front-line clinical decision support at the point of care gives it a unique position in the ecosystem. The $6 billion clinical decision support systems (CDSS) market is growing at double-digit rates annually, providing ample room for expansion.
The Path Forward: Promise and Responsibility
For OpenEvidence to justify its soaring valuation, the company must:
- Maintain rigorous accuracy and clinical reliability
- Prove measurable improvements in patient outcomes through prospective studies
- Navigate potential conflicts of interest with its advertising model
- Build strong governance frameworks around clinical AI recommendations
- Ensure outputs are treated as useful consultations subject to physician judgment, not final decisions
Early endorsements are promising. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang recently mentioned OpenEvidence among AI tools used by NVIDIA employees—free marketing few startups enjoy.
What This Means for Healthcare
OpenEvidence’s rapid ascent signals a fundamental shift in how healthcare professionals will work in the AI era. The platform demonstrates that:
- Specialized AI beats general-purpose models for professional workflows
- Free, ad-supported models can drive adoption in healthcare when built right
- Evidence-based AI can bridge the research-to-practice gap that has plagued medicine for decades
- Clinical AI adoption is happening faster than expected when tools prove genuinely useful
With this funding round, OpenEvidence is positioned to become the definitive AI assistant for medical decision-making. The company’s success could alleviate physician burnout by automating knowledge retrieval while improving patient care through better-informed clinical decisions.
The Bottom Line
This year, more than 100 million Americans will be treated by a doctor using OpenEvidence. That statistic alone underscores how quickly specialized AI is transforming professional workflows. As healthcare systems navigate budget pressures, staffing shortages, and information overload, AI tools like OpenEvidence offer a path forward.
The $200 million raise at a $6 billion valuation isn’t just a vote of confidence in one company—it’s a signal that the medical AI revolution is here, backed by Silicon Valley’s most successful investors and embraced by doctors on the front lines of patient care.
For healthcare leaders, the message is clear: AI-powered clinical decision support is transitioning from pilot programs to standard of care. The question is no longer whether AI will transform medical practice, but how quickly—and which tools will become indispensable to the next generation of physicians.
OpenEvidence is available free to verified medical professionals at their website. The platform is ad-supported and requires professional verification to access.