OpenEvidence Raises $250M at $15B, Turns to Cancer Drugs

OpenEvidence raised $250 million at a $15 billion valuation, the company disclosed this month, a 25% jump from the $12 billion mark it set just eight months earlier. The raise was not announced with a press tour. It surfaced as a single sentence inside a Sept. 16 Forbes article about a new data-sharing deal with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

That is a change in tone for a company that treated its January round, also $250 million, as a headline event. The new valuation was also a comedown from where OpenEvidence had been positioning itself months earlier: the company had floated a $20 billion mark in talks reported in July, before settling for $15 billion in September. Andreessen Horowitz and Byers Capital led the round, according to Dealroom, which tracks private financings.

On a $15 billion valuation and roughly $300 million in annualized revenue as of mid-2026, OpenEvidence is priced at about 50 times revenue, a multiple that only holds up if the growth rate underneath it keeps pace. The company says close to 40% of U.S. physicians now use it, and Memorial Sloan Kettering's own release goes further, claiming more American doctors use OpenEvidence than all other AI platforms combined.

1. January 202612 $B
2. September 202615 $B

Source: AI Weekly and Dealroom, accessed Sept. 25, 2026

What Memorial Sloan Kettering is handing over

The MSK deal, announced Sept. 16, gives OpenEvidence access to OncoKB, MSK's FDA-recognized precision-oncology database, which annotates a tumor's genetic mutations with their known effect and the therapies that target them. In exchange, MSK is embedding OpenEvidence into its own Epic electronic health record system for its oncologists.

"We're excited that OpenEvidence will widen OncoKB's reach, bringing MSK's expert interpretation of a patient's unique cancer genetics to cancer care providers across the U.S.," said Debyani Chakravarty, lead scientist for OncoKB at MSK's Kravis Center for Molecular Oncology. Anaeze Offodile, MSK's chief strategy officer, said AI has the potential to change how the hospital turns a fast-growing body of research into decisions for individual patients.

On OpenEvidence's side, Chief Medical Officer Travis Zack called OncoKB "the gold standard for making sense of a tumor's genetics," and Samyukta Mullangi, the company's vice president of clinical strategy, said the partnership would let OpenEvidence "democratize" MSK's genomic curation for doctors outside the hospital's network.

From answering questions to running trials

The funding disclosure came attached to a second, bigger shift: OpenEvidence is moving from summarizing medical literature to developing its own drugs. Nadler told Forbes the company's first oncology therapy enters clinical trials before the end of 2026, with three to five more candidates entering trials in 2027, all starting with rare cancers.

That is a deliberate lane choice. Large pharmaceutical companies generally skip rare-cancer trials because the patient pools are too small to recruit efficiently through normal channels. OpenEvidence is betting its physician network, the same one it built to answer clinical questions, doubles as a recruitment engine for exactly those patients.

What the company has not said

OpenEvidence has not disclosed a lead investor's ownership stake, confirmed whether the round is fully closed rather than partially committed, or named which indication its first drug will target beyond "rare cancers." Nadler's own comments to Forbes are the only on-the-record account of the drug program; no clinical trial registration had appeared publicly as of this writing.

The next confirming event is concrete: a trial registration or an IND filing tied to that first oncology candidate, expected before Dec. 31. Until one appears, the drug pivot is a declared intention, not a program with a patient enrolled.

OpenEvidence's rise mirrors a pattern The Terminal has tracked across vertical AI: a company built on a single workflow using its valuation and its user base to fund a move into an adjacent, higher-margin business. Harvey took the same path from legal research into deal work, and Snorkel AI has made a similar case for its data-labeling roots funding a broader enterprise platform.