Ortet, a frontier artificial intelligence lab for health, today announced its launch with a $500 million commitment from Thoreau, which is building the foundational compute, rules, and research infrastructure platform for health. Ortet will bring together compute and data infrastructure, frontier research, and model development and deployment to address health holistically across its biological, clinical, operational, and financial dimensions.

Most healthcare AI tools are built to address a single task using a narrow set of data, limiting their ability to learn from the relationships among a patient’s biology, treatment, outcomes, and interactions with the healthcare system. Ortet’s differentiated approach creates a shared intelligence foundation that can be continuously improved and adapted across scientific discovery, clinical care, health operations, and financial administration. Designed around the individual patient, the model will allow knowledge developed in one domain to strengthen performance in others.

The company is led by Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Kyunghyun Cho, Ph.D., who 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. Dr. Cho is the Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics at New York University. 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. He is joined by a founding team spanning frontier AI research, health, life sciences, and large-scale data and compute infrastructure, including:

  • Keunwoo Choi, Ph.D., Co-founder and Chief AI Officer, who previously developed AI systems at Upstage, Spotify, ByteDance, and Genentech

  • Henri Dwyer, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, who built and managed the largest GPU cluster in life sciences at Genentech following engineering roles at Instagram and Lyft

  • Jeff Hammerbacher, Co-founder and Chairman, who is the Founder and CEO of Open Athena and formerly Principal Investigator at Hammer Lab, founder and Chief Scientist at Cloudera, and Manager of the Data team at Facebook

  • Elman Mansimov, Ph.D., Co-founder and Chief Science Officer, a pioneer of neural text-to-image generation who worked across post-training and agentic AI platforms at Amazon Web Services

  • Claudia Shi, Ph.D., Founding Member of Frontier Research, who worked on research and development of AI at Meta Superintelligence Labs

“Patient health should improve with every interaction, but today its data, knowledge, and infrastructure remain too fragmented for that learning to happen at scale,” said Dr. Cho. “Ortet is building at every layer of the AI stack so that advances in research can translate into systems that understand the complete context of a patient and support better decisions across the continuum of care. Thoreau’s commitment gives us the resources and long-term foundation to pursue that mission with the ambition it requires.”

The $500 million commitment will support the development of Ortet’s compute and data infrastructure, the training and deployment of health-focused models, and continued investment in research and talent. Ortet 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. Goldman Sachs advised on the transaction.

About Ortet

Ortet is a frontier AI lab building a full-stack platform for health, spanning compute and data infrastructure, frontier research, and model development and deployment. Centered on the individual patient, Ortet connects the biological, clinical, operational, and financial dimensions of health so the system can learn from every patient, for every patient, and deliver predictably better care. Ortet is a founding Thoreau investment.

About Thoreau

Thoreau is a technology platform that creates, invests in, and acquires platforms across provider, payer, employer, life sciences, and government markets. Focused on building the foundational compute, rules, and research infrastructure for health, Thoreau’s initial platform partnerships include Ensemble, which manages over $55 billion in net patient revenue, Penelope Health, a real-time health policy intelligence platform, and Ortet, a frontier artificial intelligence lab for health. Thoreau’s mission is to simplify the administration of health, and improve and extend the lives of patients in the U.S. and globally.

Media gallery

About The Author
Business Wire