Much of the enthusiasm in the artificial intelligence boom has flowed to makers of gargantuan models like OpenAI and Anthropic.
But several more companies are also drawing the attention — and money — of investors and users alike to more specialized applications.
Among these is OpenEvidence, whose software has been likened to a ChatGPT for doctors. On Monday, it plans to announce that it has raised $200 million at a $6 billion valuation.
To many investors and technology executives, the promise of A.I. stretches beyond large-language models to smaller start-ups that cater to specific niches as well. These companies, such as the maker of the coding tool Cursor, have managed to quickly amass huge user bases with the promise of overhauling entire industries.
Over just three years, OpenEvidence has grown to become a popular tool among doctors, nurses and other medical practitioners. It now supports about 15 million clinical consultations a month, said Daniel Nadler, one of its founders. That is up from 8.5 million consultations a month in July.
The company was started in 2022 by Mr. Nadler, who previously founded an A.I. start-up that was sold to S&P Global for $550 million, and Zachary Ziegler with the idea of helping medical professionals more quickly reach diagnoses.
Its chatbot is trained on medical journals from JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine — “blue-chip stuff,” according to Mr. Nadler — to help users quickly draw on existing medical knowledge to treat patients. (That setup, as well as programming that is meant to refuse an answer that the system has low confidence in, helps reduce the likelihood that OpenEvidence would “hallucinate” a wrong answer, Mr. Nadler added.)
OpenEvidence, whose headquarters are in Miami, was engineered for rapid and widespread adoption: The company’s tool is free to use for verified medical professionals and is supported by advertising. Mr. Nadler said that setup, rather than a more traditional model like charging individual health systems, has helped it expand to more than 10,000 medical centers.
“It’s reaching verb-like status,” Sangeen Zeb, a partner at Google Ventures, the lead investor in the round, said in an interview.
(OpenEvidence was one of several A.I. start-ups recently cited by Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, as worth watching.)
In recent weeks, many investors have again raised concerns about whether the A.I. boom has become overheated, given how much money has flowed into the industry and how quickly valuations have skyrocketed.
OpenEvidence has benefited from investor interest that has translated into a flood of money: It raised a $210 million round in July at a $3.5 billion valuation, and has now collected about a half-billion dollars in funding.
But to its backers, its rapid growth was worth paying up to buy a stake in.
Mr. Zeb said that the round essentially came together over a matter of days this summer. After a presentation with Google that drew the attention of ad buyers, Google Ventures raised the idea of a new fund-raising round with Mr. Nadler on a Thursday. It ironed out many of the details by the Sunday and signed documents days later.
Other investors in the round included Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Blackstone, Thrive Capital, Coatue Management, BOND and Craft.
Mr. Nadler said that OpenEvidence would use the money for additional computing and A.I. training resources for its models, as well as to increase its investment in marketing. But he said the company’s growth trajectory justified its rapid fund-raising pace, since it was adding about 60,000 to 70,000 users a month.
He said that the company was halfway to hitting the $100 million in advertising revenue that it had expected to reach next year, after having started commercializing its app about 90 days ago.
And while some skeptics have raised the prospect of competition, Mr. Nadler said that OpenEvidence had collected more than 100 million clinical consultations, valuable data for its models to be trained on.
“No one else in the world has that data,” he said.
Michael J. de la Merced has covered global business and finance news for The Times since 2006.
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