OpenEvidence $15bn Valuation: Doximity Comparison and the Limits of Pharma Ads
OpenEvidence has raised $250 million at $15 billion, a 25% markup on January and its smallest yet. That is 3.2 times Doximity's $4.6 billion market value. The desk's arithmetic says physician ads at August volumes cannot justify the price, so expect a paid product within a year.
Doximity, the listed company that has built its business on pharmaceutical marketing to American doctors, closed on Thursday at $26.04 a share, worth about $4.6 billion. Its stock has lost roughly 65% in a year. On the same day, OpenEvidence, the free AI search engine for clinicians that sells the same kind of advertising, has raised $250 million at a $15 billion valuation. Private investors now value the newcomer at 3.2 times the incumbent.
The desk thinks the growth is real and the price is ahead of the business model. OpenEvidence has won physicians' attention faster than any product in medicine. Converting that attention into revenue through drug advertising has a ceiling, and at current volumes the ceiling sits well below what a $15 billion valuation needs. The global expansion announced this week adds users who will not see ads at all.
The valuation path has no precedent in health technology. OpenEvidence raised a Series A at $1 billion in February 2025, a $210 million Series B at $3.5 billion in July, $200 million at about $6 billion in October and $250 million at $12 billion in January 2026, co-led by Thrive Capital and DST Global. Each step multiplied the price by 3.5, then about 1.7, then 2. The reported new round multiplies it by 1.25. Investors are still paying up, but the markup has slowed sharply while usage has not.
Usage is the company's strongest card. OpenEvidence said it had about 760,000 registered US physicians and about 18 million clinical consultations a month in December. Founder Daniel Nadler said this week that US clinicians used it 42 million times in August, more than double January's roughly 20 million. Spread across December's 760,000 registered doctors, that is about 55 queries each a month, or between two and three every working day. It sounds like a reference tool that has become a habit.
The money comes from the pharmaceutical and device companies that want to be on screen when a doctor is deciding what to prescribe. The product is free to verified clinicians. Ads appear while the answer is being generated. At the time of the January round, OpenEvidence's annualised revenue was reported to have passed $100 million. Sacra, a research firm, estimates the run rate reached about $300 million by July, with CPMs in the hundreds of dollars and reaching $1,000 or more, against $5 to $15 on consumer social platforms, and with only about 5% of inventory sold. The company has not published Sacra's numbers.
The arithmetic of a doctor's attention
August's volume is the place to begin. Forty-two million consultations a month is about 504 million a year. At Sacra's $300 million run rate, OpenEvidence earns about 60 cents a consultation. On the company's own January figure of $100 million, it earned about 20 cents.
Now price it. At $15 billion, investors are paying about $30 for each consultation OpenEvidence handles in a year, and 50 times Sacra's revenue estimate. Doximity trades at about 7 times trailing revenue of $656 million, or about 6 times on enterprise value, after growing 13% in its last fiscal year and 7% in the quarter to June. If OpenEvidence were valued like Doximity, $15 billion would need roughly $2.5 billion of revenue, about $5 a consultation at August volumes.
Advertising struggles to get there. At a $1,000 CPM, one ad costs the sponsor a dollar. Show one premium ad with every consultation, sell every slot, and August's volume produces about $504 million a year. That is 1.7 times Sacra's estimate and about a fifth of the $2.5 billion the Doximity multiple implies. Closing the gap needs several paid placements per query, a doubling or tripling of volume at top prices, or a different kind of revenue. Doctors' patience for sponsored content inside a clinical answer is finite, and drug makers' digital budgets are not infinite either; MedCity News put US digital pharma advertising at $20 billion to $25 billion.
The partnership with Anthropic, announced on Tuesday, widens the audience without fixing this. Reuters reported that the two companies will offer OpenEvidence free to clinicians in about 100 low- and middle-income countries, including Uganda, Angola, Sudan, Haiti and Mongolia, with Anthropic's Claude models underneath and OpenEvidence adapting the product to local practice. Neither disclosed financial terms. Anthropic president Daniela Amodei said "market incentives by themselves would not cause it to happen." She is right, and it cuts both ways: these clinicians come with a charitable commitment and no ad market behind them.
The case for the price, and the rules
OpenEvidence's backers would say that multiples on today's revenue miss what the company could become. A tool consulted 500 million times a year sits at the point of prescribing, which no pharma channel has owned before. The same position supports subscriptions for health systems, licensing of the clinical engine, documentation, prior authorisation and referral tools, where comparable companies already charge. Abridge, which sells ambient scribing to health systems at around $2,500 per clinician a year by Sacra's estimate, was valued at $5.3 billion in June 2025 at about $100 million of recurring revenue. Hippocratic AI, which sells AI care agents by the hour, reached $3.5 billion in November. Against those, a platform with OpenEvidence's reach at $15 billion looks less extreme.
The price is a bet on products OpenEvidence does not yet sell. Each of them brings regulatory weight that the current product avoids. The FDA's clinical decision support guidance, updated in January 2026, keeps software outside device regulation when it supports a clinician's judgment and lets the clinician independently review the basis for its recommendations. A search engine that cites the literature fits comfortably. Software that produces patient-specific orders, or acts without a doctor in the loop, can become a regulated device. Liability for the clinical decision rests with the physician today, and hospital customers paying for enterprise tools will ask who carries it tomorrow.
The winners are clear. Drug and device makers have a new channel at the moment of decision. Anthropic gets its models into clinical use in about 100 more countries with a philanthropic label. Series A investors hold paper marked up fifteenfold in 19 months. Doximity is the loser in the listed market, with a shrinking multiple and single-digit growth. The latest investors, buying at $15 billion, have the least room for error.
The desk expects OpenEvidence to launch a paid product, a subscription or an enterprise licence sold to health systems, by September 30, 2027. A next round above $15 billion on advertising revenue alone, with no such product announced, would break the call. The first checkpoint is Doximity's fiscal second-quarter report, due in early November: growth back above 10% would suggest the two companies are growing the pharma budget together, and another single-digit quarter would suggest OpenEvidence is taking Doximity's share of it. After that comes any usage update from OpenEvidence beyond August's 42 million.