Vera Health says 800,000 clinicians use its free AI tool as it raises $28.5 million

Vera Health, a San Francisco maker of a free AI search tool for clinicians founded in 2024, raised a $28.5 million Series A led by Threshold Ventures and said more than 800,000 clinicians in 190 countries now use it, according to the company's announcement on October 27.

What happened

Mantis VC and SV Angel joined the round, and existing investors Y Combinator and Gradient also took part, bringing Vera's total funding to $32 million, the company said. It said it has 12 employees.

Vera describes itself as a search engine for medical evidence. According to the company, it searches more than 60 million peer-reviewed publications, clinical guidelines, consensus statements and drug labels and color-codes each claim by the strength of the supporting evidence. The company said the tool is free for licensed clinicians and medical trainees and will remain so.

The usage figures are the company's own. It said a few thousand clinicians used Vera a year ago, and that about 1 in 4 physicians in Spain and Italy and 1 in 7 in France use it, citing company data. It also said Vera has been the most downloaded clinical app in the world every month since June, based on App Store and Google Play download data from Appark, a figure FinanceInTime could not check independently.

How it started

Taieb Bennani and Maxime Allouch met over coffee a week before starting a data science graduate program at MIT, according to a profile by the payroll software company Rippling published in April 2025. Both had physician parents: Bennani's father is a retinologist and Allouch's father works in orthodontics. They began collaborating on healthcare machine learning projects at hackathons.

Y Combinator, the startup accelerator, lists Vera in its Summer 2024 batch and gives 2024 as the founding year. The company's launch post on Y Combinator's site described a closed beta with specialty physicians and biotech researchers. The founders wrote that they did their Y Combinator interview during the MIT commencement ceremony, in graduation regalia. The accelerator's profile listed a team of six at that time.

The company's announcement says the two founders initially built Vera for their own fathers, and that what began with two users grew into a platform serving hundreds of thousands of clinicians.

How it grew

In the early days, Bennani said in the Rippling profile, the founders created an advisory board of eight physicians and spent time in emergency rooms following physicians through their shifts. Emergency clinicians were the product's "stickiest early adopters," the profile said.

Growth since then has come largely through word of mouth, the company said. It said monthly downloads more than tripled between February and September, and that in September the app was downloaded more times than OpenEvidence and Doximity combined, two competing clinical tools. Vera said it went international from the start and integrates clinical policies from the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) through a partnership.

What the founders say

Allouch told Rippling that the main thing the founders learned is "to launch early, fail often, and keep doing it again." Bennani described a tactic for getting honest feedback: asking customers "to be as brutally honest as possible."

In the funding announcement, Bennani said: "We don't have the biggest team or the most money. We have the people who care the most about getting it right."

What's next

Vera said the funding will go toward its clinical evidence infrastructure, expansion into additional healthcare markets and partnerships with medical societies, publishers and health systems. It said it plans to keep investing in locally relevant clinical guidance and to let health systems add their own protocols through a product called Vera Spaces.

The announcement does not give revenue figures or say how the company plans to earn revenue from a product that is free to clinicians.