OpenEvidence Gives Doctors AI for Free. The Court Fight Shows What Free Costs.

Two headlines, one business model

Penn Medicine is deploying OpenEvidence's clinical decision-support AI to more than 10,000 clinicians across its seven-hospital system at no cost, extending the work through its 25-year Botswana partnership ¹⁶¹⁰. In the same stretch of September, a $250 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Byers Capital valued the company at $15 billion, confirmed by its founder on 28 September ³⁴⁵. The week's other headline was a court filing↗: Doximity moved to throw out OpenEvidence's lawsuit entirely ².

Health systems pay nothing; pharma pays for the screen

No hospital writes a check for this. OpenEvidence is free to verified clinicians and monetized with pharmaceutical advertising, so the health system buys nothing and the pharma dollar funds the screen ³⁸¹¹. The company says more than 40% of U.S. physicians now use it daily↗ ⁷.

Doximity sells its version instead. Doximity Scribe arrives through enterprise contracts and requires health system or practice-level purchasing decisions ⁸. Its quarter ended 30 June 2026 brought $156.6 million of revenue, up 7% year over year↗, with Scribe users up tenfold in July ⁸⁹.

Both camps are likely converging on the physician's screen because both monetize pharma attention at the point of care: Doximity routes pharmaceutical advertising budgets to physicians at their highest-intent clinical moment, and management says its AI search earns more than ten times what an answer costs to compute ⁸⁹.

The free wins and the courtroom losses run on one ledger

OpenEvidence is the plaintiff that sued Doximity ², and it told a judge it would not comply with discovery, as The Inference reported on 28 September in "OpenEvidence Took a Quiet $250M and Then Told a Judge It Would Not Comply" ¹². Doximity's motion does more than seek dismissal, adding details about vanished Slack data and borrowed NPIs ². Those details reach at the gate the free tier runs on, because a clinician's free account is created on a National Practitioner Identifier ¹¹.

Meanwhile the free rollout keeps widening: after Memorial Sloan Kettering, whose OncoKB cancer database OpenEvidence is folding onto its own platform for doctors elsewhere, came Penn's 10,000 clinicians ¹³⁶. The quiet $15 billion mark reads as pricing both at once, the widening distribution and the courtroom exposure, and it landed a quarter below the $20 billion the company reportedly explored raising at in July↗ ³⁴⁵.

The drug bet and the date that settles it

The generous reading is that founder Daniel Nadler, who sold his previous company to S&P Global, is building an edge no rival can copy: reach most of America's physicians, and recruiting the handful of patients a rare-cancer trial needs gets easier ³¹¹. OpenEvidence's first drug candidate is due in clinical trials before year-end↗, with three to five more behind it ³.

The harder reading, already circulating, is that ad-funded clinical search was hitting a ceiling and drug development made for a better story to sell ³. The first trial, and the ruling on Doximity's motion, will say which one is live.