OpenAI has acquired Torch, the team of which will join the company to work on health and wellness features for ChatGPT, Torch co-founder Ilya Abyzov said in a post on January 13.
Founded in 2024, Torch is led by founder and CEO Abyzov, who previously co-founded Forward Health. The startup’s other co-founders include Eugene Huang, James Hamlin and Ryan Oman.
An unnamed person familiar with the matter told The Information that OpenAI paid about $100 million in equity for the startup. Both companies said Torch’s four-person team is moving to OpenAI.
Abyzov said the team will work to “build ChatGPT Health into the best AI tool in the world for health and wellness.”
Torch was built as a system to aggregate personal medical data from hospitals, laboratories, wearables and consumer health services into a single platform.
“We designed Torch to be a unified medical memory for AI, bringing every bit of data about you from hospitals, labs, wearables, and consumer testing companies into one place,” Abyzov said.
He said the product was developed with beta users and that feedback highlighted its role in helping people better understand their health.
Abyzov said the decision to join OpenAI was driven by the scale of ChatGPT’s user base. “I can’t imagine a better next chapter than to now get to put our technology and ideas in the hands of the hundreds of millions of people who already use ChatGPT for health questions every week,” he wrote.
He also addressed concerns around data handling. “We wouldn’t have taken it on if we didn’t think that OpenAI cared as much as we do about privacy, safety, collaboration with physicians, and building something at an extremely high level of craft and consumer polish,” Abyzov said.
The Torch team previously worked together at Forward, where they aimed to build large-scale healthcare services. “This isn’t the way we guessed it would happen, but making Torch a part of OpenAI means the mission we started at Forward is closer than ever,” Abyzov said.
Explaining the broader vision, Torch, in a blog post, said that fragmented health data limits the usefulness of AI in medicine. “AI can’t help you if your health data is scattered across four hospitals, two labs, seven apps and three web portals,” the company said.
