Attention co-author Kyunghyun Cho launches healthcare foundation model startup Ortet with $500M
kchonyc · x · 2026-10-13
- Kyunghyun Cho, NYU professor and co-developer of the attention mechanism and GRU, has founded Ortet, a frontier AI lab for health aiming to build foundation models that learn across biological, clinical, and operational data for predictably better care. Thoreau has committed $500M to the vision.
- In a podcast interview, Cho discusses why healthcare needs its own foundation models, the "cold start" problem he thinks they can solve, how Ortet differs from general-purpose AI labs, why it secured $500M before really getting started, and how his own cancer experience shaped the vision. He previously co-founded Prescient Design, sold to Genentech, and worked at FAIR under Yoshua Bengio's academic lineage.
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