Two weeks ago, OpenEvidence was a $15 billion medical search engine headquartered in Miami. This week, it announced plans to become a drug developer. It also struck a partnership with Anthropic to reach patients on nearly every continent.
The Miami company is partnering with Anthropic on AI-powered clinical decision support for physicians in nearly 100 low- and middle-income countries. The list includes Uganda, Angola, Sudan, Haiti and Mongolia. The service will be free.
A Free Product Aimed at a Global Gap
OpenEvidence already answers doctors’ questions in the U.S. and Canada, drawing on peer-reviewed research and treatment guidelines, at no cost to clinicians. In August alone, U.S. doctors consulted it 42 million times, according to founder Daniel Nadler.
The new version targets a different problem: doctors practicing where journal subscriptions are scarce and specialist expertise is thin. Anthropic supplies the back-end technology. OpenEvidence adapts the system to local disease patterns, diagnostic resources and available treatments.
“Access to medical knowledge shouldn’t depend on geography,” Nadler said.
Dr. Ahmed Bendary, a cardiologist at Benha University in Egypt, called the expansion “a tremendous leap forward” for journal-scarce regions.
The Bigger Move Is Further Upstream
The global rollout is the visible announcement. The more consequential one is what OpenEvidence plans to do with its data.
Nadler told Forbes the company intends to build its own pipeline of cancer therapies. The plan draws on data from its Memorial Sloan Kettering partnership and an earlier deal with the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. He expects the first drug to enter clinical trials before the end of 2026. Three to five more candidates should follow next year, focused initially on rare cancers.
That’s a different company than the one most people know. OpenEvidence built its reputation in Miami helping physicians interpret existing medicine. Developing drugs means creating new medicine, with all the regulatory timelines, trial costs and failure rates that come with it.
Why Partner With a Potential Rival
OpenEvidence’s approach to competition looks unusual for a company sitting on a $15 billion valuation. OpenAI, Anthropic and other major AI companies are all pushing into healthcare. Some of those tools could eventually compete with what OpenEvidence offers. Rather than keeping Anthropic at arm’s length, OpenEvidence just handed it a global distribution partnership.
That’s a bet that being the destination for point-of-care medical answers matters more than which model runs underneath. Anthropic gets a foothold with doctors and real experience handling sensitive medical data. OpenEvidence gets infrastructure it would otherwise have to build itself, in dozens of countries, on a compressed timeline.
A Local Company Making Global Bets
OpenEvidence has raised more than $1 billion in the past year from Thrive Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital and Nvidia. Its valuation moved from $12 billion in January to $15 billion by September. Most of that capital and attention has stayed pointed at the company’s Miami headquarters.
A cancer drug pipeline and a 100-country distribution deal aren’t small side projects for a startup this size. They’re the kind of bets that take years to pay off or fail publicly trying. Either way, the company running them is based here, not in San Francisco or Boston.