Ortet launched on 29 September as what its founders call a frontier AI lab for health, with a $500 million commitment from the investment firm Thoreau covering infrastructure, model training and research.
The chief executive is Kyunghyun Cho, whose earlier work includes the gated recurrent unit and the attention mechanism that transformer models are built on, and who previously co-founded Prescient Design and led Genentech’s frontier research team. He is joined by Keunwoo Choi as chief AI officer, Henri Dwyer as chief technology officer, Elman Mansimov as chief science officer and Jeff Hammerbacher, a Cloudera co-founder, as chairman. The company is based in New York.
The stated goal is a patient-centred foundation model spanning biological, clinical, operational and financial data rather than any one of those in isolation. “Patient health should improve with every interaction,” Cho said in the launch statement.
There is no product, no model and no published results. This is a funding and hiring announcement, and the claims about what the platform will eventually do are the company’s own. What makes it worth noting is the size of the commitment and the seniority of the founding team, in a field where most health AI money has gone to narrower diagnostic tools.