OpenEvidence just doubled its valuation in three months. The medical AI platform announced a $250 million Series D at $12 billion on Wednesday, co-led by Thrive Capital and DST Global, barely three months after raising at a $6 billion valuation. The funding sprint signals that venture capitalists aren’t sweating competition from OpenAI and Anthropic’s newly launched health products, betting instead that specialized medical platforms will carve out their own turf.
The speed of OpenEvidence’s ascent is the real story here. Three months ago, the medical database startup was valued at $6 billion. Today it’s at $12 billion. That’s the kind of velocity you typically see in breakthrough consumer apps or infrastructure plays, not specialized B2B healthcare platforms. Yet here we are.
The Series D announcement landed Wednesday, with Thrive Capital and DST Global leading the $250 million round. The company has now raised $700 million total, pulling in support from heavy hitters like Sequoia Capital, Nvidia, Kleiner Perkins, Blackstone, Bond, and Craft Ventures. Even Mayo Clinic backed them, which tells you something about the credibility they’ve built with the actual medical establishment.
So what’s driving this frenzy? The usage numbers are pretty jaw-dropping. OpenEvidence says its free, ad-supported platform handled 18 million clinical consultations from verified healthcare professionals in the U.S. in December alone. Compare that to just 3 million monthly searches a year ago. That’s a six-fold increase year-over-year. They’ve also crossed $100 million in revenue.
The platform itself is basically a modern medical reference engine purpose-built for doctors. Think of it as what WebMD was to the early internet, but instead of hypochondriacs googling their symptoms, it’s physicians hunting for treatment guidance, drug interactions, and clinical evidence during patient consultations. The distinction matters because it means OpenEvidence operates in a different lane than the consumer health AI products that OpenAI unveiled last week or the Claude for Healthcare tool that Anthropic just launched.
This is worth noting because when those announcements dropped, the immediate reaction in some quarters was panic. The thinking went: if OpenAI and Anthropic are launching health features, doesn’t that tank the value of specialized health startups? The funding round is basically VCs saying “no, not really.” There’s room for both. Anthropic’s Claude for Healthcare targets patients, payers, and providers broadly. ChatGPT Health is consumer-focused. OpenEvidence is drilling deep into the actual clinical workflow – the moment a doctor needs to look something up while treating a patient.
