Today, I’m thrilled to announce Pathway's $5 million seed funding round. This marks a significant step towards our mission to make evidence-based medical knowledge more accessible and integrated into clinical practice worldwide.
Simplifying clinical information
Clinicians are facing the most overwhelming increase in medical information in history. Medical knowledge doubles roughly every 73 days, with ongoing clinical studies ballooning from about 2,000 in 2000 to nearly 454,000 in 2023. In biomedicine alone, more than 1 million articles are published on PubMed annually – roughly 2 papers per minute. This surge contributes to overwhelming rates of burnout and depression in healthcare professionals, to say nothing of the fact that an estimated 45% of patients receive care that's based on outdated evidence.
It’s clear that the exponential growth of medical data outpaces traditional, linear methods of managing it, leaving modern clinicians, who expect instant, seamless information, struggling to keep up.
Pathway is designed to help clinicians handle the ever-increasing volume of medical information. By leveraging advanced technology, including generative AI, we're building a better way to organize and present vast amounts of complex medical data. Our goal is to ensure clinicians can easily access up-to-date information without feeling overwhelmed, so they can offer the best possible care to their patients.
From prototype to Pathway
Why did we start Pathway? Because we know firsthand how acute the problem of managing medical information is. During his Internal Medicine residency, our co-founder Louis began by creating summaries of key medical guidelines. These summaries were the foundation of our initial app, GuidelineMD, which rapidly gained popularity among doctors.
Facing the need to scale content production, we encountered a bottleneck. With one clinician on the team and little funding, we couldn't match our main competitor, who employed over 7000 authors and editors. This challenge required a better "machine behind the machine" to aggregate data, leading to the birth of Pathway and its underlying technology.
Growth and traction
Pathway has grown significantly since, largely due to the incredible feedback and support from a global clinical community. This has resulted in over 370,000 clinicians from 200 countries registering on our platform, many of whom are in the United States. Thousands of clinicians are choosing our premium product over free options, showing just how much value Pathway provides. The platform now offers over 70,000 recommendations on 30,000 clinical topics and is becoming a default clinical co-pilot for healthcare professionals worldwide.
The path forward
This funding will help us to refine Pathway's user experience, introduce features that respond directly to our users' needs, and broaden our reach to support clinicians globally. Our commitment is to continually evolve based on user feedback, ensuring every clinician using Pathway has the tools and information they need to provide exceptional care, regardless of location.
Today we're also launching Pathway AI in a limited beta. This tool combines the power of generative AI with our extensive, physician-vetted medical knowledge graph, delivering accurate, referenced answers to clinical queries. While it's currently available to verified clinicians in the US, we plan to expand its availability soon.
In our pursuit of accessibility, we've opened up more of Pathway's content for free. Our goal is to provide unrestricted access to evidence-based information to all, regardless of location or background. Existing Pathway Plus subscribers still get access to premium content and features and priority access to Pathway AI beta. We'll be releasing more updates on this soon.
We have many more exciting announcements planned over the coming months, so stay tuned.
Details of the round
The seed round was led by Yamaha Motor Ventures, joined by Verge HealthTech Fund, with participation from existing investors Amplify Capital, BoxOne Ventures, and Formentera Capital.
We’re also excited to have the backing of several physicians who have experienced the transformative potential of Pathway firsthand.
Our gratitude
We're thankful to our investors, team, and clinician community for their trust and support, which drives us daily to make healthcare knowledge more accessible and actionable. We’re dedicated to spending the next decade and beyond improving this platform as we push the boundaries of clinical support tools, making clinicians worldwide more efficient, and helping patients globally get access to the best possible care.