Ortet launched as a frontier artificial intelligence lab for health with a $500 million commitment from Thoreau. The company is building a full-stack AI platform spanning compute and data infrastructure, frontier research, model development, and deployment.
Ortet’s approach centers on developing a patient-focused foundation model designed to connect the biological, clinical, operational, and financial dimensions of health.
The company said many existing healthcare AI systems are built for narrowly defined tasks and limited datasets, which can limit their ability to learn relationships across a patient’s biology, treatment history, outcomes, and interactions with the broader healthcare system.
Ortet is building a shared intelligence foundation that can improve continuously and adapt across scientific discovery, clinical care, healthcare operations, and financial administration.
The company said knowledge developed in one area could strengthen performance in others through a system designed around the individual patient.
Ortet is led by Co-Founder and CEO Kyunghyun Cho, Ph.D.
Cho co-developed the attention mechanism and Gated Recurrent Unit, technologies that helped establish foundations for modern AI architectures.
He is also the Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics at New York University.
Before launching Ortet, Cho spent five years building an AI platform focused on lab-in-the-loop molecular design.
He co-founded Prescient Design and later established Genentech’s frontier research team following Prescient Design’s acquisition.
Ortet’s founding team also includes Co-Founder and Chief AI Officer Keunwoo Choi, Ph.D., who previously developed AI systems at Upstage, Spotify, ByteDance, and Genentech.
Henri Dwyer serves as Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer and previously built and managed Genentech’s largest GPU cluster after engineering roles at Instagram and Lyft.
Jeff Hammerbacher is Co-Founder and Chairman. He is Founder and CEO of Open Athena and previously served as Principal Investigator at Hammer Lab, Founder and Chief Scientist at Cloudera, and Manager of the Data team at Facebook.
Elman Mansimov, Ph.D., serves as Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer and previously worked on neural text-to-image generation as well as post-training and agentic AI platforms at Amazon Web Services.
Claudia Shi, Ph.D., is a Founding Member of Frontier Research and previously worked on AI research and development at Meta Superintelligence Labs.
The $500 million commitment from Thoreau will support development of Ortet’s compute and data infrastructure, health-focused model training and deployment, and continued investment in research and talent.
Ortet has already secured its initial GPU cluster and is building the technical foundation required to move research into production at scale.
The company expects to work with customers across the health ecosystem from launch, using real-world needs to guide development of its models and products.
Goldman Sachs advised on the transaction.
Ortet is a founding Thoreau investment.
Thoreau is building foundational compute, rules, and research infrastructure across healthcare markets including providers, payers, employers, life sciences, and government.
Its initial platform partnerships also include Ensemble, which manages more than $55 billion in net patient revenue, and Penelope Health, a real-time health policy intelligence platform.
KEY QUOTES:
“Patient health should improve with every interaction, but today its data, knowledge, and infrastructure remain too fragmented for that learning to happen at scale. 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.”
Kyunghyun Cho, Ph.D., Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ortet
