Weekly Health Tech Reads 1/25/2026

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The rumored round by OpenEvidence was announced this week, with the company raising $150 million at a $12 billion valuation, led by Thrive Capital and DST Global. It has now reached an annual revenue run rate of $100 million, only a handful of months after commercialization via ads on the platform.

OpenEvidence shared at JPMorgan earlier this monththat its platform had 17.9 million clinical consults in December 2025, up from 2.6 million per month in December 2024. It’s an incredible growth trajectory for a healthcare company that does seem to be reaching verb status among clinicians. Its funding trajectory has been equally incredible — over the past year, OpenEvidence has raised ~$635 million across four funding rounds while its valuation has increased 12x. Here are the previous rounds:

If you’re Sequoia Capital and you led the Series A in February, your $75 million investment has grown to something close to $1 billion in the course of a year. Needless to say, I am sure they are thrilled with OpenEvidence. If you’re OpenEvidence CEO Daniel Nadler and still own 58% of the company, I imagine you’re even happier.

The valuation question is a fascinating one here, which I’ll dive deeper into below. For investors in this Series D round at a $12 billion valuation, they must see a path for OpenEvidence to become a $50+ billion business, and at least some chance of it becoming a $100+ billion business.

It’s worth noting that OpenEvidence’s biggest competitor, Doximity, is currently generating ~$620 million in annual revenue and has a market cap of around $7.5 billion. The entire healthcare digital advertising market in the US is estimated at $26 billion in spending. Point being, in order for new investors to see returns here, it seems OpenEvidence will need to redefine the market entirely.

The Medical Superintelligence Narrative

The most interesting part of its funding round to me is that it lays this foundation for the next phase of OpenEvidence’s vision, centered on building medical superintelligence. The press release describes it as follows:

Nadler also articulated this idea during his presentation at JPMorgan last week. As I heard it, it sounds a lot like a digital twin of the Mayo Clinic — AI models that are best-in-class in each specialty, each working together to answer challenging questions from physicians.

It’s not hard to imagine why this narrative has investors frothing at the mouth — imagine an oncologist in rural Georgia being able to immediately tap into the knowledge of the equivalent of all of the best specialists in the world via OpenEvidence. Theoretically, it seems like a good way to rewire the healthcare system from the ground up.

I am by no means the world’s foremost AI expert, but it doesn’t seem that crazy to me that this will be feasible from a tech perspective in the next few years. What I am much more skeptical of is the business model behind it.

OpenEvidence’s Business Today: Selling Provider Attention

While it is certainly an appealing vision, it is also a giant leap from where the business is today — a company that has rapidly grown to $100 million in revenue by selling physicians' attention to pharmaceutical manufacturers.

I came across this quote, which I think nicely summarizes the dynamics at play here as OpenEvidence has rapidly grown to $100 million in revenue:

The plot twist here: that quote was from a 2009 interview with Epocrates CEO Kirk Loevner about the opportunity in front of Epocrates. If you go back 25 years, there are many similarities in the narrative arcs between Epocrates and OpenEvidence here — new technology emerges that gives physicians an easier way to access vast amounts of information to improve clinical care. Twenty-five years ago, that new technology was a PalmPilot. Today, that technology is AI. In both cases, it’s a more efficient way for a clinician to access information. To encourage adoption, you offer it for free and monetize providers' attention using the tool. As Loevner said, it’s a gold mine.

The Epocrates journey also hints at the challenges that inevitably come ahead for OpenEvidence. Presumably, the reason pharma is so happy to spend billions a year on advertising to providers is that there is an ROI from those ads. The tension there is obvious, and Epocrates started facing issues as a public company around this. It tried to build out other product offerings, including an EHR, but stumbled badly before eventually being acquired by athenahealth in 2012.

That journey highlights why I don’t think this is a question of technological capabilities, but rather one of trust. If you’re a cancer doctor in rural Georgia, and you know this platform is serving you up ads from oncology manufacturers, are you really going to trust it as your “default operating system of medical knowledge” when trying to answer challenging medical questions about your patients? I really don’t think so. Humans are going to be what slows down OpenEvidence, not the technology.

This is why I think the more challenging question for OpenEvidence ahead is not a technology question, but rather a business model innovation question. Its current model is enabling its rapid growth, but it seems to suffer from a fundamental misalignment with its broader vision. The organizational design is wrong. So while it seems there is a clear pathway to building the AI-era version of Doximity, that business will inevitably look a lot like Doximity today, generating hundreds of millions in revenue by selling providers' attention.

Look no further than OpenEvidence’s commercial team for evidence of this, most of whom have been poached from Doximity over the last twelve months, presumably to leverage their preexisting commercial relationships with a small set of pharma buyers. While that seems like a logical move in a red-ocean strategy to take revenue from a competitor, it doesn’t strike me as a move you make if you’re building a new form of medical superintelligence.

For investors in this OpenEvidence round, by definition, they’re going to disagree with my take there, and I think it’s interesting to unpack that more using a famous previous debate about valuations.

Open Evidence & the Gurley-Damodaran Debate on Valuation

OpenEvidence’s rapid ascent reminds me of the famous valuation debate between Aswath Damodaran and Bill Gurley a decade ago. Damodaran and Gurley went back and forth over Uber’s valuation after it had raised funding at a $18 billion valuation in June 2014. Damodaran, a professor who wrote the book on DCFs, argued that Uber was significantly overvalued based on his analysis, suggesting that $6 billion was more appropriate. Gurley, who was on the board of Uber, argued that Damodaran missed the point — Uber was significantly undervalued in ways that wouldn’t show up in a DCF as its offering allowed it to fundamentally redefine the market. It was a really great, civil public debate on the topic.

Given Uber’s market cap today sits around $170 billion, it seems clear that Gurley saw something that Damodaran didn’t. I think it’s interesting to apply a similar lens to OpenEvidence when thinking about all of this.

I recognize I fall in the Damodaran camp when it comes to OpenEvidence — I don’t see the path to the market opportunity that the investors here must see. It strikes me that the best case scenario for these investors is a Livongo or Oak Street-esque exit at the top of the market to a large player desperate for a strategic move in healthcare. And if Nadler’s texts to Doximity’s sales team are any indication, that seems to be his plan as well. Given the Doximity / OpenEvidence legal spat that is playing out in the courts, we can see some of these texts where he shares his plans to retire in the next 2 - 3 years.

None of the above strikes me as the behavior of a leader attempting to fundamentally change how people access care.

I’d be curious to know where the community lands on this OpenEvidence valuation question—what do you think it will be worth in five years?

Chief of Staff at Pearl Health, a primary care physician enablement platform. Learn more.
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