Clinical artificial intelligence search engine Vera Health secured $28.5 million in series A funding to accelerate and expand its platform.
Threshold Ventures led the funding round, with participation from Optum Ventures, Mantis VC and SV Angel. Existing investors Y Combinator and Gradient tripled down in the round, according to the Oct. 27 announcement.
“Vera is compelling because it starts with the evidence, not just an answer—helping clinicians find and assess the research behind a decision while making its strengths and limitations visible,” said Emily Melton, Threshold Ventures co-founder and managing partner, in a statement. “By bringing that evidence to the point of care, Vera becomes a trusted clinical intelligence layer, not just another AI tool.”
Vera Health’s platform scans more than 60 million peer-reviewed publications, clinical guidelines, consensus statements and drug labels, executives say.
“New medical knowledge still takes an estimated 17 years to reach clinical practice, according to research in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine,” said Taieb Bennani, Vera Health co-founder. “Our mission is to close the gap between what medicine knows and what every patient receives. Today, that gap is measured in years. We want it measured in seconds.”
Bennani told Fierce Healthcare the company’s approach is built around four principles: honesty, traceability, transparency and context.
“The first, and for me the most important, is honesty,” Bennani said. “Language models are built to sound certain; medicine rarely is. A general-purpose model produces plausible sentences, but medicine requires verifiable ones. So we built Vera the other way around: it finds the evidence first, and only then writes the answer. In essence, it’s a search engine that reasons like a clinician.”
The search engine is used by more than 800,000 clinicians in 190 countries, up from “a few thousand” a year ago, Bennani said.
“That growth has been driven by clinicians themselves,” Bennani said. “Most found Vera through another clinician, a colleague down the hall, rather than through a large sales operation. Every month since June, Vera has been the most downloaded clinical app in the world across the App Store and Google Play. In September, it was downloaded more times than several of the biggest players in our space combined, companies worth 100 times or more what we’ve raised.”
Bennani continued, “That’s the clearest sign we’re solving a real problem. Clinicians don’t come back to a tool every day unless it earns their trust. And the need is the same everywhere: across countries, specialties and health systems.”
Vera Health will use the fresh capital to invest further in its evidence infrastructure, international expansion, partnerships and its team, according to Bennani.
“Vera is what it is because of the people who build it, and we love how much a small team can achieve: we doubled from six to 12 people while reaching more than 800,000 clinicians,” Bennani said. “As we grow faster in local markets, we’re now hiring internationally, close to the clinicians and health systems we serve. We’ll grow, but we’ll stay focused and obsessed with the product.”
Vera Health has raised $32 million to date, executives say.
Competition in the clinical AI and medical search market has intensified as established clinical reference companies like Elsevier's ClinicalKey and Wolters Kluwer's UpToDate compete with AI-native tools like OpenEvidence and Doximity Ask, as well as consumer tech giants OpenAI and Anthropic.