OpenAI acquires Torch, a four-person healthcare startup, to power ChatGPT Health
Jan 13, 2026
Key Points
- OpenAI acquires Torch, a four-person healthcare startup that aggregates lab results, medications, and visit recordings into a medical memory engine, to power ChatGPT Health.
- Torch co-founder Ilia previously led Forward, a $1 billion healthcare startup that shut down in 2024 after pivoting to AI-driven medical kiosks and running out of money.
- The acquisition signals OpenAI's strategy to consolidate fragmented medical data across hospitals, labs, and wearables into its ChatGPT Health product.
Summary
OpenAI has acquired Torch, a four-person healthcare startup that consolidates lab results, medications, and visit recordings into a medical memory context engine. The acquisition powers ChatGPT Health, OpenAI's newly launched health product.
Torch addresses a fragmentation problem in medical data. Patients access only a fraction of their own records, scattered across multiple hospitals, labs, apps, and web portals. Clinicians lack time to synthesize the growing stream of data patients bring from wearables and consumer health companies. Torch's technology unifies scattered records to give patients and doctors a complete picture and help ensure nothing gets lost.
Torch's founders
One co-founder, Ilia, previously built Forward, a healthcare startup founded in 2016 that attempted to rebuild the healthcare system from the ground up with a preventive-care model. Forward operated subscription-only physical spaces designed to feel like Apple stores, initially rejecting insurance. Backed by Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, and Eric Schmidt, among others, Forward expanded to dozens of locations by 2018 through 2022, featuring body scanners and real-time blood work. The company reached a $1 billion valuation in 2021 and raised roughly $250 million in a Series D.
Forward then pivoted to care pods, AI-driven medical kiosks aimed at autonomous care delivery. The bet proved premature. Forward shut down abruptly in 2024 after running out of money. Ilia and the team regrouped quickly with Torch, which OpenAI has now absorbed.
The acquisition signals OpenAI's intent to consolidate health data access and build deeper integration with medical records and wearable data into ChatGPT Health.