The company says it now serves more than 800,000 clinicians in 190 countries, and it has raised a $28.5 million Series A to keep growing. Existing investors Y Combinator and Gradient also put in more money, bringing Vera’s total funding to $32 million. The company says it has done this with only 12 employees and little marketing.
Most clinicians found the tool through colleagues, it says. Vera also says it has been the most downloaded clinical app in the world every month since June, and that in September it was downloaded more often than OpenEvidence and Doximity combined. A year ago, Vera Health had a few thousand users. Threshold Ventures led the round, with participation from Mantis VC and SV Angel. Those figures come from Appark data cited by the company. Monthly downloads have more than tripled since February.
It searches more than 60 million peer-reviewed papers, guidelines, consensus statements and drug labels. The company says it does not train on their questions and is HIPAA and GDPR compliant and SOC 2 Type II certified. Vera is a clinical search engine. Its pitch is that it finds the evidence first and writes the answer afterward. It ranks sources by study design, level of evidence, cohort size, recency, journal quality and citation impact. Each claim links to its source and is color-coded by the strength of the evidence behind it. For a rare condition with only a small case series, the answer shows up red, so doctors can see how little supports it. The tool is free for licensed clinicians and trainees. It has a partnership with the American College of Emergency Physicians, which puts the group’s clinical policies into answers with source attribution. Health systems can also load their own protocols through a feature called Vera Spaces.