A new frontier artificial intelligence lab for healthcare launched with a $500 million commitment from Thoreau.
The AI startup, Ortet plans to build a full-stack platform for health, spanning compute and data infrastructure, frontier research and model development and deployment. The aim is to create a foundation model centered on the individual patient that connects the biological, clinical, operational and financial dimensions of health.
The company says it wants to move past narrow AI tools that address only a single task by creating a shared intelligence foundation that can be continuously improved and adapted across scientific discovery, clinical care, health operations and financial administration, according to executives. That shared intelligence layer can learn across multiple aspects of a patient's healthcare journey, including biology, treatment, outcomes and interactions with the healthcare system, according to executives.
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Kyunghyun Cho, Ph.D. co-developed the attention mechanism and the Gated Recurrent Unit, foundational advancements in modern artificial intelligence which laid important groundwork for the transformer architecture underlying today’s large language models. He previously spent five years building an AI platform for lab-in-the-loop molecular design, co-founding Prescient Design and, following its acquisition, establishing Genentech’s frontier research team.
Other Genentech AI alums Keunwoo Choi, Ph.D. and Henri Dwyer also join Cho as co-founders. Choi will serve as chief AI officer and Dwyer, who also held engineering roles at Instagram and Lyft, will serve as chief technology officer.
The founding team also includes Elman Mansimov, Ph.D., chief science officer, a pioneer of neural text-to-image generation who worked across post-training and agentic AI platforms at Amazon Web Services, Jeff Hammerbacher, the founder and CEO of Open Athena and formerly principal investigator at Hammer Lab and manager of the data team at Facebook and Claudia Shi, Ph.D., founding member of frontier research, who worked on research and development of AI at Meta Superintelligence Labs.
The company secured $500 million from investment firm Thoreau to support the development of its compute and data infrastructure, the training and deployment of health-focused models and continued investment in research and talent.
Ortet says it has secured its initial GPU cluster and is building the technical foundation needed to move research into production at scale. The company expects to work with customers across the health ecosystem from launch, grounding its models and products in real-world needs.
Thoreau is a healthcare investment platform founded by private equity executive Matt Holt. Thoreau's initial platform partnerships include revenue cycle management company Ensemble Health Partners and Penelope Health, a real-time health policy intelligence platform.