Forus raises $150M Series C at $3B valuation — its AI network for medicine now reaches 85% of US ZIP codes

Speaker 2: Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. And we have our next guest already here. We're running behind, but we'll bring in Sahir from Forrest, the founder and CEO. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Hey. Good to see you guys. Please. What's going on? Sorry. We ran to follow. Introduce the company. Tell us the news. I want You're headlining for Greg Brockman right now. There we go. No pressure. Great opener. Yeah. Opener. It's a lot of news. Yeah.

Speaker 13: I mean, last time I was here in May, we had just introduced for us publicly as the AI Network for Medicine Yeah. And announced you know, $1,000,000,000 valuation. I'm back here now four months later, and we're announcing our $150,000,000 series c at a $3,000,000,000 valuation. And the biggest change for us is scale. Right? We're now supporting millions of people across all 50 states, courses already used by Doctor Street patients in 85 of US residential ZIP codes, and we're now working with nine of the top 15 global biopharma companies to help them advance medicines.

Speaker 2: What is the most helpful thing you can do for global biopharma companies? We were just talking about trial patient recruitment, but then there's also like the much more fundamental research. There's even just general having a coding agent around can be useful to a biotech company. But what are you seeing move the needle for them?

Speaker 13: Yeah. I mean, so there's an enormous amount of capital and talent going into using AI to discover new molecules. Sure. Right? And that is going to work. Yeah. We're gonna generate more potential medicines for more diseases faster than we ever have before. Yeah. But discovery is really that only the beginning piece, right? Still takes more than a decade and billions of dollars to turn a new molecule into an approved medicine and you have to develop it, you have to launch it, have to get the right doctors, secure coverage and distribution and ultimately get it to patients. The network that we are building is really intended to help provide both the insight and visibility and the connectivity that kind of support all those steps, right? So once a new molecule is ready to test in people, you identify the right clinical trial sites and recruit the right patients. As you prepare to launch, you understand which physicians have patients who look like the patients who did best in the phase three trials. How should the medicine reach them? What coverage and distribution need to look like? Once it's on market, need to understand, you know, who's receiving it, where adoption or access is breaking, whether people are staying on it, what side effects or positive results we're hearing. The way that our platform works, it gives us increasing visibility into how medicines are performing nationwide as well as kind of the clinical and practice behavior of patient physicians across the country. So for example, a new drug that came out earlier this year back in March for an autoimmune disease, forty percent of all people who have ever taken that drug came through our platform. Woah. And you can imagine, like, that level of visibility is unprecedented. Yeah. Right? The FDA doesn't have that. The company that made the drug doesn't have that. The HR companies don't have that. And so we have more clarity on what's happening on that medicine, how impactful is it, where is it getting stuck than anybody has before. And that can help these pharma companies not just drive the process more quickly and efficiently, but actually make it more predictable. Mhmm. Right? And I think kind of the bigger picture in our minds is that as you kind of get this process faster, cheaper, but more predictable, you can actually change the economics of creating medicine. You can actually make it so these companies can afford to invest in more drugs for more diseases because you have this huge bottleneck between the number of medicines that are theoretically being discovered as molecules and the total number that are actually coming out to market. Right? It's kinda like the movie industry where there's thousands and thousands and thousands of screenplays, but the number of movies actually get produced and become blockbusters at premiere is very small. So And that's really what our goal is, really how can you increase the number of medicines that make it to market every year by an order of magnitude. Yep.

Speaker 1: People within the tech industry talk about the AI labs just needing to cure cancer, and that will fix the or help fix the public People will love data centers then. They'll be like, put one in my backpack. What does the pharma industry think about that sort of like line of thinking? Oh, yeah. Because they're sitting you guys are sitting over there actually doing doing the work, not one shotting a blanket cure for all different forms, but at least making consistent progress towards a bunch of these different types of cancer. So I'm very curious.

Speaker 13: Yeah. I was literally talking to the CEO of a top 10 pharma about this couple weeks ago at a conference. I was like, it's kind of crazy that you guys have such a bad rap. Yeah. And yet the people who have the worst rap in the game right now are thinking that being more like you.

Speaker 2: It's a great tip. No.

Speaker 13: And he was like, yeah, it's it's super hard for them to process, like, what these people are thinking. Yeah. And at the same time, I think it's a little bit of a wake up call. Like, maybe you need to reclaim the story a little bit. Totally. Because, I mean, until we become immortal, medicine is gonna become this like, it's a permanent industry to invest in. It's increasingly become the most important thing Sure. That's happening Yeah. Yeah. To, you know, advance society. And these companies are at the root of creating all these amazing cures, amazing treatments are villainized

Speaker 2: Yeah. Because

Speaker 13: people don't understand their position. Even the way that people refer to them as like manufacturers, you know, versus like inventors, creators, whatever is is I think tough. But, you know, they're also at the same time feeling really eager to invest in AI. I mean, of the reason we've seen such dramatic uptake is because most of these leaders are like, well, we need to reinvent our businesses because we are already actually doing so much of the complicated and and game changing r and d. And yet, we're gonna benefit from some of the tools that people are gonna sell us to help us do some of that molecule research faster. We need to reclaim the story and and accelerate how much we're pushing kind of through the market. I mean, even like GLP ones, like, how much credit are they getting? I was just saying this. Yeah. Totally. Totally. Yeah. It's like you sort of cured obesity pretty close to it. That was a huge problem for people. Done in the last day? I'm just imagining, like like like in, you know, amnesia, you wake up and you're the CEO of Pfizer, and you're like, do I do for a living? It's like, you help sick people. And they're like, I must be loved.

Speaker 2: Like, actually quite the opposite. Crazy times. The

Speaker 13: story around GLP ones itself is, like, I think even still underrated. I believe an influx in applications Yeah. From bariatric surgeons wanting jobs

Speaker 2: in technology and trying to kinda move out of medicine Yeah. Because GLP ones have basically eliminated that specialty Yeah. As, like, something that matters in the country, which so crazy. Yeah. It's crazy. Last question. What is the biggest insight that you gained from working at Oscar Health that you carried into today? Like like what is the thing that you're like, okay. I understand the structure of the industry or I understand this thing or this Care is easy. Is that Yeah.

Speaker 13: I mean, I think the thing that really clicked for me there is how much discontinuity and heterogeneity there is in the system Mhmm. Which prevents any individual player from really, like, even tracking what's happening, let alone having control over the process. Yeah. Right? It's actually what I think makes this problem so interesting and and and beneficial to to to focus on with agents. Yeah. Right? There's, like, no standard case in the system. Sure. Every doctor's office has different systems and processes. Every insurance company has different rules. Every drug has different clinical and coverage and distribution requirements. And even individual patients have their own financial situations, medical history, eligibility, and insurance circumstances. And so the level of, you know, difficulty in actually making progress before this technology, was kind of hard to, under, underwrite. And we've seen is, like, not only can you use ATT to kind of dramatically change how quickly and efficiently these processes occur, but you can actually because you were the first company to actually see the full process and control the full process, like, create new market power and change things that historically would have only been in the hands of the insurance companies and hospitals to really operate. Yeah. Well, congrats on the progress.

Speaker 2: Amazing news. Yeah. Really wild wild progress. Bank Capital, love They needed a win. No. We love them. Thank you so much for coming We'll on the talk to you soon. Thanks, See you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring,