OpenEvidence, a Miami startup that runs an ad-supported AI search engine for doctors, is now valued at $15 billion, and nearly two-thirds of US doctors are reportedly using it to help make patient decisions.
Daniel Nadler, a serial entrepreneur, founded the company in 2022. Its chatbot searches medical journals and clinical guidelines to help physicians diagnose and treat patients. The company said that American physicians, who number about 1 million, sent it more than 42 million prompts in a single recent month. Growth came largely by word of mouth. Nadler called it "the first viral consumer internet app in healthcare" in an interview, which is a founder's pitch, and the usage numbers are company-supplied too.
Take both figures at face value and the picture is a habit, not a trial. Roughly 650,000 doctors sending 42 million prompts works out to about 65 queries per doctor per month. Few tools in the sector have seen similar traction, according to the reporting.
Doctors have long leaned on reference databases and ordinary search engines, so the tool itself is not the novelty. The novelty is a chatbot that condenses the literature into an answer, paid for by advertising. Ads beside health information are old news on the consumer web. Ads inside a workflow where the output informs a diagnosis are a different arrangement, and the questions that follow are about separation: how sponsored content is kept apart from clinical answers, and who checks.
There is no evidence that advertisers influence its answers. But a $15 billion valuation raises the stakes on that point. The sharper question is whether doctors use the tool as a faster route to the underlying sources or start treating the summary as the answer.