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A pioneering artificial intelligence lab dedicated to healthcare has been established with $500 million in backing from Thoreau. The startup, Ortet, aims to develop a comprehensive platform encompassing compute and data infrastructure, frontier research, model development, and deployment. Their goal is to create a foundation model centered around the individual patient, integrating biological, clinical, operational, and financial aspects of health.

The team behind Ortet includes experts with extensive experience in AI, such as Kyunghyun Cho, Ph.D., who co-developed the attention mechanism and Gated Recurrent Unit, foundational elements of modern AI, and the transformer architecture. Other co-founders include Keunwoo Choi, Ph.D., Henri Dwyer, Elman Mansimov, Ph.D., Jeff Hammerbacher, and Claudia Shi, Ph.D.

Thoreau, a healthcare investment platform founded by Matt Holt, has provided the initial $500 million investment to support Ortet's efforts in developing compute and data infrastructure, training and deploying health-focused models, and continuous research and talent investment. The company is already setting up its technical foundation and expects to collaborate with customers from the health ecosystem, tailoring its models and products to real-world needs.