Dubbed ChatGPT for doctors, medical AI startup OpenEvidence has raised $200 million in a funding round led by Google Ventures.
OpenEvidence’s new cash infusion follows on the heels of a successful $210 million funding round just three months ago, when the company was valued at $3.5 billion.
According to The New York Times, this round — which also includes investments from Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Blackstone, Thrive Capital, Coatue Management, BOND, and Craft — values the company at roughly $6 billion, affirming investor confidence in niche uses of AI platforms beyond the growing ubiquity of large language models.
Sangeen Zeb, General Partner at Google Ventures, said in a LinkedIn post, “Yesterday [19 October] was the 10th anniversary of my little brother Amir’s death. He was only 30. During his health struggles, I met so many clinicians who were understaffed, sometimes very early in their careers, and always overworked. It’s Daniel Nadler’s [one of OpenEvidence’s founders] hope, and mine, that OpenEvidence’s immensely powerful AI platform can help unburden these dedicated healthcare professionals so they can continue to provide the best care to their patients.”
Started three years ago in Miami, Florida, OpenEvidence is trained on medical journals from The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). It aims to help its users, mostly medical professionals, to quickly get answers from existing stores of medical knowledge to help patients. Access to the platform, which is ad-supported, is free for verified medical personnel.
The platform now supports about 15 million clinical consultations a month, up from 8.5 million consultations in July. Nadler attributes the rapid growth to its advertising model versus traditional models, such as charging individual health systems.
Betting big on niche LLMs
OpenEvidence’s soaring valuations and widening investor base signal growing confidence in specialized, domain-trained AI. While general-purpose models like ChatGPT and Gemini dominate public use, investors are increasingly directing capital toward systems that apply LLMs to highly regulated sectors, especially healthcare.
In a recent report by Silicon Valley Bank, while overall fundraising in the healthcare innovation sector is down, growth in healthtech AI, particularly in administrative and backend tools, has grown twice as fast since 2022 and accounts for nearly a third of all healthcare investment in the first half of 2025.
“AI will likely not be pigeon-holed into back-office use cases,” the report’s authors stated. “There is still plenty of excitement for potentially revolutionary AI applications in healthcare, from speeding up the drug discovery process to improving diagnostic accuracy and patient outcomes. In fact, all sectors have seen significant growth in AI deal activity since 2022, while deal activity has declined more than 20% for healthcare companies that do not leverage AI.”
In this context, OpenEvidence’s attention-grabbing funding round makes sense and is in line with investors’ growing preference for specialized platforms over general-purpose chatbots. It also underscores the market’s confidence in vertical AI models that deliver measurable results in high-stakes sectors like healthcare.
With Nadler reporting that the platform continues to add about 60,000 to 70,000 users a month, the company’s plans for the $200 million are equally telling. Nadler told The New York Times that OpenEvidence will invest in “additional computing and AI training resources for its models, as well as to increase its investment in marketing.”
Roadblocks remain ahead
Despite rapid investment and adoption, AI in healthcare faces steep challenges. Beyond the ongoing need to safeguard patient data, constantly changing regulatory standards and clinical validation requirements pose their own roadblocks to predictable and continued sector growth.
As competition accelerates, startups like OpenEvidence must balance innovation with accountability to earn lasting trust among clinicians and healthcare institutions.
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