Ever felt like you're drowning in a sea of "new studies" that seem to contradict everything you learned last year? Doctors feel it too. Every single day. In fact, medical knowledge is basically doubling every few months now. It's an impossible firehose to drink from. That is precisely where Daniel Nadler and Open Evidence come into the picture, and honestly, it’s kind of wild how fast they've taken over the hospital breakroom conversation.
We aren't talking about another "maybe it’s right" AI chatbot here. This isn't ChatGPT hallucinating a recipe for glue on pizza.
Open Evidence is a highly specialized medical search engine that has managed to do the impossible: earn the trust of the most skeptical, "show me the peer-reviewed data" people on the planet. By early 2026, over 40% of all physicians in the United States were using it. That’s not a slow rollout; that’s a stampede.
Who is Daniel Nadler?
If the name sounds familiar, you probably know him from the finance world. Daniel Nadler is the guy who founded Kensho, which he sold to S&P Global for a cool $550 million back in 2018. He has a PhD from Harvard and a weirdly diverse background—he’s a published poet and a film producer, too.
But when COVID-19 hit, Nadler saw a massive gap. Doctors were trying to save lives using tools that felt like they were from the 90s while the actual science was moving at warp speed. He teamed up with Zachary Ziegler, a machine learning expert from Harvard, and they decided to apply the same "intelligent synthesis" that worked for Wall Street to the world of medicine.
The result was Open Evidence.
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What Open Evidence Actually Does (And Why It’s Different)
Most AI models are generalists. They’ve read the whole internet, including Reddit threads and fan fiction. That’s a nightmare for a doctor who needs to know the exact dosage for a rare autoimmune complication. Daniel Nadler and Open Evidence took a different path. They trained their system exclusively on the "gold standards" of medical literature.
We’re talking about 35 million peer-reviewed publications.
The Citation Obsession
The biggest problem with AI in medicine is "hallucinations"—where the AI just makes stuff up. Open Evidence handles this by being obsessively transparent.
- Every answer has a citation. You don't just get a paragraph; you get links to the specific studies in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) or JAMA.
- It admits when it doesn't know. If the literature is messy or inconclusive, the system says so. It doesn't guess.
- The "DeepConsult" Feature. This is their newer "agentic" AI. It can basically act like a PhD research assistant, cross-referencing hundreds of studies in parallel while the doctor is actually seeing patients.
It's basically a "superpower" for clinicians who are already burned out. Instead of spending two hours on PubMed after a shift, they get the answer in three seconds at the bedside.
The $3.5 Billion Valuation and the Sequoia Connection
People often ask how a "search engine" gets valued at billions of dollars so quickly. In July 2025, Open Evidence closed a massive $210 million Series B round. This pushed their valuation to $3.5 billion. For a company that only really started making waves a couple of years ago, that is an insane trajectory.
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Big names like Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins are all in on this.
The business model is actually pretty interesting, too. Instead of charging hospitals millions in "enterprise software" fees—which usually takes years of red tape to approve—Nadler made the tool free for verified doctors. They use an ad-supported model, similar to how medical journals work. This "bottom-up" adoption meant doctors started using it because they liked it, not because some IT department forced them to.
Moving to Miami and the "Viral" Growth
By the end of 2025, Nadler moved the company’s headquarters to Miami. It’s part of a bigger trend, sure, but for Open Evidence, it coincided with reaching a massive scale. They are now supporting over 8.5 million clinical consultations every single month.
Think about that.
That means millions of treatment decisions are being shaped by the synthesis provided by this AI. If the AI helps a doctor catch one rare drug interaction or suggests one newer, more effective treatment protocol found in a study published last week, it’s literally saving lives.
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Why Doctors Actually Trust It
It’s not just the tech; it’s the partnerships. Open Evidence isn't scraping the web illegally. They have formal deals with the American Medical Association and the publishers of the top journals.
When a doctor sees a result, they know it’s coming from the same journals they spent a decade studying in med school. That trust is the "moat" that keeps competitors like OpenAI or Google’s general models at bay in the clinical setting.
Actionable Insights for Healthcare Professionals
If you’re a clinician or even a med student, you've probably already seen the Open Evidence interface. But if you haven't integrated it into your workflow yet, here is how people are actually using it to save time:
- Prior Authorization Letters: Use the tool to draft letters to insurance companies. It can automatically pull the relevant evidence and citations needed to justify a treatment, saving hours of paperwork.
- Patient Handouts: You can ask it to generate evidence-based instructions for patients in "plain English" so they actually understand their discharge notes.
- Complex Case Validation: When you hit a "zebra" (a rare condition), use the search to see the most recent case studies. The AI is much faster at finding the "long tail" of medical research than a standard keyword search.
- Board Prep: Many residents are now using it to quiz themselves or clarify complex pathophysiological mechanisms that aren't clearly explained in older textbooks.
Daniel Nadler and Open Evidence represent a shift in how we think about "expert" AI. It’s not about replacing the expert; it’s about making the expert's life less of a headache. In a world where there’s a projected shortfall of 100,000 doctors by 2030, this kind of efficiency isn't just a "nice to have"—it’s essential for the system to keep functioning.
To get started, verified clinicians can sign up for a free account on the Open Evidence platform to access the full suite of research tools and the "Visits" documentation assistant. For those in medical education, exploring the "DeepConsult" agents can provide a massive leg up in literature reviews and complex case analysis.