OpenEvidence: 'ChatGPT for Doctors' 2026 Plans and Strategic Outlook

Nelson Advisors
8 hours ago
7 min read

OpenEvidence entered 2026 on an extraordinary growth arc. In January 2026, the Miami-based company closed a $250 Million Series D led by Thrive Capital and DST Global, doubling its valuation to $12 Billion, up from $6 Billion just three months earlier.

The round brought total funding raised over the prior 12 months to nearly $700 Million, with backers including Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures (GV), Nvidia, Kleiner Perkins, Craft Ventures, Coatue, Blackstone, ICONIQ, Mayo Clinic, and Henry Kravis.

The funding trajectory in 2025 alone was remarkable:

February 2025: $75 Million Series A led by Sequoia at a $1 Billion valuation
July 2025: $210 Million Series B co-led by GV and Kleiner Perkins at $3.5 Billion
October 2025: ~$200 Million Series C at $6 Billion
January 2026: $250 Million Series D at $12 Billion

Scale and Adoption Metrics

OpenEvidence claims to be the most widely used clinical decision support platform among U.S. physicians, with adoption statistics that are staggering by healthcare software standards:

Over 757,000 verified doctors have signed up for the platform.
More than 40% of U.S. physicians use the platform daily, across 10,000+ hospitals and medical centers.
In December 2025, the platform facilitated approximately 18 million clinical consultations — up from roughly 3 million per month a year earlier.
By January 2026, that number exceeded 20 million consultations per month.
Over 100 million Americans were treated by a doctor using OpenEvidence in 2025.
The platform hit $100 million in annual revenue by January 2026, growing from an estimated $7.9 million annualised in December 2024 to $50 million annualised by mid-2025.

Business Model and Revenue

OpenEvidence's core product, an AI-powered medical search engine, remains free to all verified clinicians. Revenue is generated primarily through pharmaceutical advertising served during the brief loading period while answers are generated.

The model targets a large addressable market, US Digital Pharma ad spending totals roughly $20–25 Billion annually and OpenEvidence offers precise targeting to the approximately 600,000 U.S. prescribers, a uniquely high-value audience commanding CPMs of $70–150+, compared to $5–15 on consumer social platforms. CEO Daniel Nadler has indicated a preference for disciplined growth over aggressive spending, noting that OpenEvidence aims to "find a balance between growth and future profitability" rather than burning billions.

Beyond advertising, the company is exploring or developing:

Enterprise per-seat pricing for health system deployments integrated into EHR workflows
Premium enterprise features (priority compute, custom knowledge bases, advanced visualisation)
Data insights subscriptions for pharma, device manufacturers, and payers (aggregated, anonymised usage data)
API licensing for clinical decision support integration into third-party platforms

2026 Product Plans and Expansion

EHR Integration and Enterprise Strategy

One of the most significant 2026 developments is OpenEvidence's push into EHR-embedded workflows. In February 2026, Sutter Health announced a collaboration with OpenEvidence to integrate the platform within Epic's electronic health record, allowing Sutter clinicians to perform natural-language evidence searches without leaving their charting environment. This represents a major step beyond the standalone mobile/web app model that drove initial adoption.

This EHR integration strategy is expected to shift OpenEvidence's revenue model over time — moving from ad-supported free access toward enterprise per-seat pricing that could increase average revenue per user by 5–10x compared to advertising alone. Early FHIR-based pilots with Epic installations are already underway.

Clinical Documentation: "Visits"

In August 2025, OpenEvidence launched Visits, a clinical documentation tool that automatically generates medical notes from patient conversations. This ambient scribe capability puts the company in direct competition with players like Abridge and Ambience Healthcare. In 2026, the company is expected to continue expanding this offering, leveraging its existing physician relationships and medical knowledge infrastructure to bundle evidence-based decision support with documentation.

Veeva Partnership — Open Vista

In October 2025, OpenEvidence and Veeva Systems (NYSE: VEEV) announced a long-term partnership to jointly develop Open Vista, an AI product suite designed to:

Increase patient access to clinical trials by connecting physicians and patients with relevant trials
Accelerate drug discovery through better understanding of unmet needs
Improve understanding and adoption of existing approved medicines

The first Open Vista product offerings are expected to launch in 2026. This partnership leverages OpenEvidence's reach with 40%+ of U.S. physicians to bridge the gap between life sciences R&D and point-of-care clinical practice.

Workflow Expansion Beyond Search

OpenEvidence's roadmap extends beyond clinical search into a broader set of medical workflows. The company is building AI agents capable of:

Auto-drafting clinical notes and discharge summaries
Generating prior authorisation letters with evidence supporting medical necessity
Surfacing drug interaction risks in real time
Suggesting order sets and ICD-10 codes at the bedside
Creating patient education handouts in accessible language

The strategic aim is to consolidate functions currently spread across UpToDate, Lexicomp, Abridge and Cohere Health into a single AI-powered intelligence layer embedded directly in clinical workflows.

International Expansion

While OpenEvidence has so far focused almost entirely on U.S. physicians, the company has signalled plans for global expansion as a key 2026 and beyond initiative. English-first markets, the UK, Canada and Australia, represent immediate opportunities with lower regulatory barriers. Multilingual model development could subsequently unlock EU and Latin American markets. With an estimated 15 Million physicians globally, international expansion represents a significant growth vector.

User Base Expansion

Beyond physicians, OpenEvidence sees an opportunity to expand to 5.2 Million nurses and advanced practice providers, as well as pharmacists, medical students, and pharmaceutical medical science liaisons. This expansion could effectively double or triple the domestic user base.

Content Partnerships and Trust

A core element of OpenEvidence's competitive moat is its exclusive content licensing agreements with premier medical publishers:

New England Journal of Medicine (February 2025)
JAMA Network and all 11 JAMA specialty journals (June 2025)
American Medical Association
National Comprehensive Cancer Network
PubMed, FDA, and CDC

These partnerships ensure that the AI generates answers exclusively from trusted, peer-reviewed sources, a critical differentiator from general-purpose LLMs that may draw from unreliable sources like Reddit forums.

Competitive Landscape

OpenEvidence faces competitive pressure from several directions:

Competitor	Approach	Key Threat
Epic (Art for Clinicians)	Native AI scribe and decision support embedded in EHR workflows, backed by 300M+ patient records via Cosmos	Distribution advantage — 40%+ of hospital EHR market
UpToDate (Wolters Kluwer)	Expert-curated clinical reference; charges hospitals ~$500/seat	Incumbency with institutional buyers, but slower to adopt AI
OpenAI / Anthropic	ChatGPT for Health and Claude for Health initiatives	General-purpose AI expanding into healthcare verticals
Doximity	Physician networking platform with AI features	Large physician network, but less embedded in clinical decision-making
Atropos Health / DynaMed	Enterprise-sold clinical evidence platforms	Top-down institutional sales model

The key question for 2026 is whether Epic and other EHR vendors will view OpenEvidence as a partner or a competitor. Epic's development of its own AI capabilities could potentially block third-party integrations, though OpenEvidence's FHIR-based approach and direct physician loyalty offer some insulation.

Risks and Open Questions

Accuracy and regulatory scrutiny: As the platform scales, concerns about AI accuracy, bias, and overreliance will intensify. Clinical software that shapes decisions must be accountable when errors occur.
Sustainability of ad model: The pharma-ad-supported approach is highly lucrative but draws comparisons to Outcome Health, a once-valued healthcare unicorn whose founders faced criminal charges for fraudulent ad metrics.
EHR dependence: Long-term revenue growth via enterprise sales depends on successful integration with Epic and Oracle-Cerner, which have strong incentives to develop competing capabilities internally.
Valuation justification: At $12 billion on ~$100 million in revenue, OpenEvidence trades at roughly 120x revenue — a premium that requires sustained hypergrowth to justify.
Competition from big tech: OpenAI and Anthropic are investing heavily in healthcare-specific AI products, potentially eroding OpenEvidence's differentiation over time.

Strategic Outlook for 2026

CEO Daniel Nadler has framed the company's main competitor as time itself, the urgency to get the platform into every doctor's hands before patients miss the benefit. The 2026 strategic priorities appear to centre on:

Deepening EHR integration through partnerships like Sutter Health/Epic to become embedded in clinical workflows
Launching Open Vista products with Veeva for clinical trial matching and pharma intelligence
Expanding the user base beyond physicians to nurses, APPs, pharmacists, and medical students
Building workflow tools that move the platform from a reference tool to a comprehensive clinical intelligence layer (documentation, prior auth, order sets)
Beginning international expansion, starting with English-speaking markets
Scaling pharmaceutical ad revenue while developing enterprise and subscription revenue streams

OpenEvidence's trajectory from founding to $12 billion in under four years is one of the most aggressive in healthcare technology history. Whether the platform can successfully transition from a consumer-style physician app to an enterprise-embedded clinical infrastructure layer, while fending off Epic and big tech, will determine whether its 2026 plans translate into lasting market dominance.

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