OpenEvidence started with a relatively straightforward pitch: give doctors a better way to find answers buried across a vast body of medical research.
Four years later, the Miami-based company is worth $15 billion, has raised more than $1 billion over the past year, is working with one of the world’s leading cancer centers and Anthropic, and is preparing to do something far more ambitious than answer doctors’ questions: develop cancer drugs of its own.
The latest sign of OpenEvidence’s rapid expansion came with a new $250 million funding round led by hospital systems and Andreessen Horowitz, according to Business Insider. The deal valued the company at $15 billion, up from the $12 billion valuation it secured in another $250 million round in January.
That makes the fundraising cadence almost as notable as the number itself. OpenEvidence has now raised more than $1 billion over the past year from a roster that includes Thrive Capital, DST, GV, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, and Nvidia..
But the bigger story may be what OpenEvidence plans to do with its growing war chest.
Founded in 2022 by Daniel Nadler (pictured left) and Zachary Ziegler, OpenEvidence built an AI-powered clinical search platform designed to help physicians quickly find and interpret medical evidence. The company has described it as “the fastest-growing application for physicians in history.”
Now, it is pushing deeper into oncology.
OpenEvidence recently struck a partnership with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center that will integrate its technology directly into MSK’s Epic workflow. At the same time, MSK’s OncoKB precision oncology knowledge base will be incorporated into OpenEvidence, giving physicians outside the cancer center access to its expert interpretation of cancer-related genetic alterations.
The idea is to make highly specialized cancer knowledge available at the moment doctors are making treatment decisions.
“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 last week.
OpenEvidence’s plans go further still. Nadler told Forbes that the company intends to use data from its MSK relationship, along with information from an earlier agreement with the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, to build its own pipeline of potential therapies. He said OpenEvidence expected to get its first drug into clinical trials before the end of 2026, followed by another three to five potential therapies next year, with rare cancers among its initial areas of focus.
That would mark a striking shift for a company best known as something of a “ChatGPT for doctors.” OpenEvidence would effectively be moving from helping physicians understand existing medicine toward trying to create new medicine itself.
The expansion comes as competition in healthcare AI is heating up. OpenAI, Anthropic, and other major AI companies have been pushing further into healthcare, while specialized companies are building products across clinical documentation, medical search, and other physician workflows.
OpenEvidence is working with some of those potential competitors rather than keeping them at arm’s length. This week, it announced a partnership with Anthropic to provide AI-powered clinical decision support to physicians in nearly 100 low- and middle-income countries.
“Access to medical knowledge shouldn’t depend on geography,” Nadler said of the partnership.
READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI:
- OpenEvidence lands $250M to further develop the AI doctors already rely on
- HealthSnap raises $25M to turn its AI promise into a growth engine
- Ambition Accelerated applications now open to help startups scale in fintech, healthtech, defense and resilience
- Housing became a healthcare problem. Upside just raised $20M to tackle it.
- OpenEvidence hits $15B valuation as its ambitions move far beyond medical search – September 25, 2026
- This October, Smart City Expo Miami returns for seventh edition focused on urban intelligence – September 24, 2026
- Father-son startup ClaimAngel is taking on the high cost of lawsuit funding – September 23, 2026
