Ortet, a New York-based artificial intelligence company focused on health, has launched with a $500 million investment commitment from Thoreau. The capital is intended to support compute and data infrastructure, the training and deployment of health-focused AI models, and continued investment in research and talent. Goldman Sachs advised on the transaction.
The company is led by co-founder and CEO Kyunghyun Cho and is building a full-stack AI platform spanning computing infrastructure, data, frontier research, and model development and deployment. Ortet plans to develop AI systems that combine biological, clinical and operational information around individual patients, with potential applications across scientific discovery, clinical care, healthcare operations and financial administration.
The founding team also includes Keunwoo Choi, co-founder and chief AI officer; Henri Dwyer, co-founder and chief technology officer; Jeff Hammerbacher, co-founder and chairman; Elman Mansimov, co-founder and chief science officer; and Claudia Shi, a founding member of frontier research. Members of the team have previously worked across organisations including Genentech, Meta, Amazon Web Services, Spotify, ByteDance, Instagram and Lyft.
Ortet has secured an initial GPU cluster and is building infrastructure to support the development and production deployment of its models. The company said it expects to work with organisations across the health ecosystem as it develops its technology.
Cho is the Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics and a professor of computer science and data science at New York University. Before Ortet, he co-founded Prescient Design, which was acquired by Genentech, and later worked on frontier AI research at Genentech.
Thoreau is a healthcare technology and investment platform that creates, invests in and acquires businesses across provider, payer, employer, life sciences and government markets. The firm is led by former New Mountain Capital private equity executive Matt Holt.
