Company leader
Daniel Nadler
Founder and CEO
OpenEvidence
Daniel Nadler is founder and chief executive of OpenEvidence, a Miami, Florida company whose AI search engine answers doctors' clinical questions with citations to peer-reviewed research. He built and sold Kensho, an AI company for financial analysis, then started OpenEvidence after his grandfather died following a medical error.
Growing Up the Grandson of a Survivor
"My grandfather was in Auschwitz and survived," he said. After the war his family could not get into the United States and settled in Canada, and he grew up in Toronto, where his father had come from Romania and his mother from Poland. He earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Toronto.
Studying at Harvard and the Federal Reserve
At Harvard he earned a PhD in political economy, with a thesis on how credit derivatives are priced, and studied poetry under the Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham. As a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve he was stunned to find regulators making critical assessments in basic spreadsheets.
Building Kensho
On a graduate student's stipend he teamed up with programmer Peter Kruskall to start Kensho, which built software to make financial analysis as easy as a web search. "No one was talking about AI in 2012," he said of its early chatbot. S&P Global bought Kensho in 2018.
Founding OpenEvidence
He founded OpenEvidence in November 2021 with Zachary Ziegler, then a machine learning PhD student at Harvard, after his grandfather died following a medical error. He put about $10 million of his own money into the company before raising outside funds, and in 2023 it joined Mayo Clinic's accelerator for health technology startups.
To train on reliable medicine he went to the publishers. "What if I do with these nonprofit medical societies what Steve did with the record labels?" he said, recalling how he courted the New England Journal of Medicine and the American Medical Association as partners. OpenEvidence is free for verified clinicians, earns its money from advertising, and cites the studies behind every answer.
Life in Surfside
He lives in Surfside, Florida, north of Miami Beach. In the years between selling Kensho and starting OpenEvidence, he spent his time paddleboarding and studying the classics.