On Monday, OpenAI acquired Torch, a tiny four-person startup that solves the exact problem ChatGPT Health can’t: unifying fragmented medical data scattered across hospitals, labs, wearables, and consumer health apps into a single, AI-readable system. The timing tells you everything. ChatGPT Health launched January 7. The acquisition closed January 13.
For context, more than 40 million people use ChatGPT daily to ask health questions. That’s 230 million health-related queries every week—roughly one in four ChatGPT users engaging with medical content. But until now, those answers had a limitation: your data was incomplete because it lived in dozens of disconnected places.
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Torch’s technology—what its founders call “a medical memory for AI”—pulls together lab results, medications, visit recordings, prescription histories, and wearable data that would otherwise take hours to manually consolidate. That infrastructure slots directly into ChatGPT Health, which already connects users to 2.2 million U.S. healthcare providers through its partnership with b.well.
For Torch’s founders—Ilya Abyzov, Eugene Huang, James Hamlin, and Ryan Oman—the acquisition is a dramatic reversal of fortune. They previously worked together at Forward Health, the AI-powered primary care startup that raised over $400 million before abruptly collapsing in late 2024, leaving nearly 200 employees without jobs. Less than a year later, they’re integrating their technology into a platform with 800 million weekly active users.
“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,” Abyzov wrote on X.
The urgency makes more sense when you look at the timing. Anthropic launched Claude for healthcare on January 11—just four days after ChatGPT Health went live. Anthropic’s offering includes HIPAA-ready tools for both healthcare providers and consumers, putting direct pressure on OpenAI to move faster and deeper into the space.
Emmanuel Umahi
The competitive stakes are high. ChatGPT Health isn’t HIPAA-compliant for consumer use, meaning health data stored through the platform remains accessible through subpoenas or court orders. OpenAI emphasizes that health conversations aren’t used to train its models and operate in a separate, encrypted space, but privacy concerns remain sharp.
Reports conflict on the purchase price. The Information pegged it at $100 million, while CNBC’s sources said $60 million. Either way, the deal represents a bet that AI can reshape how millions of people navigate healthcare—if it can actually access the right data.
The Torch acquisition isn’t just about fixing a product gap. It’s about speed. OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health knowing it was incomplete, then moved within days to acquire the exact technology it needed. That’s not careful product planning. That’s reactive execution under competitive pressure.
For the 40 million people already using ChatGPT for health advice daily, the integration means answers grounded in your actual medical history instead of generic recommendations. For OpenAI, it’s a signal that building in healthcare requires buying capabilities, not just developing them internally.
The execution challenge is what comes next.
Oluwajeminipe Fasheun-Motesho
