OpenEvidence raises $250 million to $15 billion, announces it will manufacture its own drugs

The clinical search engine has gone from $12 billion to $15 billion in valuation in eight months, and has announced a first candidate in clinical trials before the end of the year.

OpenEvidence has completed a $250 million round that values the company at $15 billion, compared to $12 billion in a raise of the same amount in January. In twelve months, the company founded in 2022 by Daniel Nadler and Zachary Ziegler has raised more than $1 billion, in a round of funding that includes Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, DST, GV, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia and Nvidia.

The most notable thing, however, is not the amount, but the change in profession that accompanies it. Until now, OpenEvidence has been selling a search engine for doctors, which queries the medical literature and returns sourced answers — the company presents itself as the fastest-growing application ever observed among practitioners. It has now announced that it wants to develop its own oncology treatments, with a first candidate expected to enter clinical trials before the end of 2026 and three to five others in 2027, oriented towards rare cancers.

Two partnerships are supporting this shift: the integration of Memorial Sloan Kettering's OncoKB database into clinicians' workflows, and an agreement with Anthropic to distribute the decision support tool in a hundred low- and middle-income countries. The fact remains that moving from a documentary tool to a therapeutic pipeline requires skills — testing, regulatory, manufacturing — that no search engine acquires by the quality of its answers alone.