A Look Back
In December of 2023, about 6 months before we went public, we changed our name from Tempus Labs, Inc. to Tempus AI, Inc. At the time, I thought it made sense, as we had long since evolved from being just a lab. I wanted to convey that Tempus was at its heart, a tech company, with a mission to advance intelligent diagnostics. For us, intelligent diagnostics has always meant providing accurate and contextualized information at the time a critical healthcare decision is being made.
We occasionally get flack from people who don’t understand our business and believe that we are merely capitalizing on a trend. They often point to the fact that of our 3 products – Diagnostics, Data, and Applications – our Applications business is the smallest at single digit percentages of our total revenues; as if to prove that the AI part of our business is small. What they don’t understand is how deeply embedded AI is across all of our business units, and how each of these components is foundational to being an “AI company” in healthcare.
Unlike on the internet, where AI companies can take advantage of mass amounts of publicly available information, already ubiquitous connectivity, and customers who are used to pushing the boundaries of technology adoption – healthcare requires each of these pieces to be built, and connected, entirely from scratch.
When you’re a true AI company, AI isn’t a single product you sell, it’s an integral part of everything you sell. I was reminded of this the other morning when our CMO, Patty Spiller, sent around a list of every video we had made in the past year or so. I had not watched them all together in one sitting, and I was a bit blown away. Each video highlighted how one of our products is leveraging the power of AI to solve some of healthcare’s biggest challenges.
The first video I watched was our Tempus Vision video: Link
Followed by how we are deploying our LMM agent – Tempus One or “One” for short – throughout all of our products: Link
One servicing our providers to help them make data-driven decisions: Link
One now living directly in the EHR to help physicians not only when they order Tempus tests, but across all of their patients: Link
One, and our other agentic tools, powering our main provider application, Hub: Link
We also highlight one of our new products in Hub, called Notetaker, which leverages LMMs: Link
Our AI tools are not just provider focused. We also describe how our platform is helping life science companies advance drug discovery and development: Link
How One, and our other AI products, are advancing research through our data analytics platform, Lens: Link
How we are using AI to route patients to the optimal therapeutic across disease areas, allowing us to close care gaps and improve clinical trial enrollment: Link
How our collective tools can be used to advance diagnostics, focusing on just one of our products in immunotherapy: Link
How we have expanded our diagnostics in oncology beyond comprehensive genomic profiling for therapy selection as part of our MRD and monitoring suite: Link
And then we end with our consumer application, which leverages One and our entire AI suite of products, called Olivia: Link
Finally, we highlight just a few of our physician and patient testimonials: Link Link
To build and deliver these types of products at scale in healthcare requires considerable groundwork – which we have laid – over the past decade. You need hundreds of thousands of NGS tests running each year providing rich molecular insights. You need millions of longitudinal clinical journeys to be able to answer a question in seconds. You need deep connections to thousands of providers to render insights instantly at the point of care. These AI building blocks can’t be assembled overnight. They take real time.
As I look across the landscape of companies in our space, more and more each one sounds like Tempus – literally. If you read their website and ours, you almost can’t tell the difference. They have the words “AI,” “Data,” and “Technology” riddled throughout their marketing materials, regardless of whether or not those products or services are actually leveraging AI.
While it may be in vogue to be an AI company, we’ve been here from the beginning. It’s in our DNA you might say.
And if you want to really unpack whether a company is truly AI focused, you need only look at their products, their investments, their platform, and their revenues – as in what percent of their business comes from products other than the lab tests they sell.
When taking on a mission as large as bringing AI to healthcare you can’t invest just when things are in vogue. At Tempus we’ve had ~700 software engineers & scientists building AI and machine learning products for the vast majority of our existence. Those investments are paying off today – helping fuel our unit growth, even at our scale, and our data business, even at our scale – a trend we expect to continue as we infuse AI across everything we do.
As I look back at what we’ve built, it’s no wonder.
