Why Healthcare Needs Its Own Foundation Models | Ortet Founder & CEO Kyunghyun Cho

Ortet raised $500M from Thrive pre-launch to build a healthcare-specific foundation model that keeps each partner's learned knowledge proprietary, unlike general AI labs.

• $500M pre-traction: Thrive (referred to as "Thoreau" in transcript) committed $500 million to Ortet before the company had meaningfully started, a signal of trust rather than pure funding need, per Cho.
• Cold-start problem: Cho argues healthcare AI needs its own foundation model—a "universal health model"—because without a broad pretraining base, teams don't know what data to collect for narrow downstream problems.

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