Artificial intelligence health startup Ortet has launched with a $500 million commitment from technology investment platform Thoreau, as the company looks to develop a patient-centred foundation model spanning research, clinical care and healthcare operations.
The company is led by co-founder and CEO Kyunghyun Cho, a New York University professor and AI researcher who previously co-founded Prescient Design. The AI drug discovery startup was acquired by Genentech in 2021, after which Cho established Genentech's frontier research team and worked on AI systems for molecular design.
Ortet is positioning itself as a full-stack AI lab for healthcare, combining computing and data infrastructure with AI research, model development and deployment. Rather than developing separate models for individual healthcare tasks, the startup plans to build a shared intelligence layer designed around the individual patient.
The company said its approach will connect biological, clinical, operational and financial information, with the aim of allowing knowledge developed in one area of healthcare to improve AI performance in others. The platform is being designed for applications ranging from scientific discovery and clinical care to health operations and financial administration.
Cho is joined by a founding team with backgrounds across AI research, life sciences and large-scale computing. Co-founder and Chief AI Officer Keunwoo Choi previously worked on AI systems at companies including Spotify, ByteDance and Genentech. Co-founder and CTO Henri Dwyer previously built and managed Genentech's largest GPU cluster after engineering roles at Instagram and Lyft.
The team also includes Jeff Hammerbacher as co-founder and chairman. Hammerbacher previously founded Cloudera and led Facebook's data team. Elman Mansimov, who has worked on neural text-to-image generation and agentic AI, joins as co-founder and Chief Science Officer. Claudia Shi, previously involved in AI research and development at Meta Superintelligence Labs, is a founding member of frontier research.
Thoreau's $500 million commitment will be directed towards computing and data infrastructure, training and deploying healthcare-focused models, research and talent. Ortet has already secured its initial GPU cluster and is building the infrastructure required to move its research into production.
The company expects to begin working with customers across the healthcare ecosystem from launch, using real-world requirements to inform the development of its models and products. Goldman Sachs advised on the transaction.
Ortet's launch comes as healthcare AI development increasingly expands beyond individual applications towards foundation models capable of working across larger datasets and workflows. The company's model remains at an early stage, and its performance across clinical and operational settings will depend on how the technology is developed, validated and deployed.
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