How Tempus Is Bringing Us Closer to the Future of Healthcare

In 2001, my brother Dan was diagnosed with brain cancer. Dan gave everything to his battle, including working with the Case Foundation to create Accelerate Brain Cancer Cure (ABC2), an organization that is still helping to find a cure today. Nearly ten years later, my wife Jean received a breast cancer diagnosis. Today, she is a proud survivor. The fight against cancer has been an important part of my life for almost two decades, for the family members I love and for every family affected by this terrible disease.

As an investor, I am always excited by companies that can change lives for the better — especially when it comes to fighting cancer. Revolution Growth portfolio company Tempus is one such company. And today, Tempus announced that it has raised an additional $110 million, valuing the company at $2 billion. It’s a sign of serious momentum for the company, which is taking on this country’s massive healthcare industry (it’s one-sixth of the U.S. economy), and it’s a signal that the sector is finally starting to get the disruption it deserves.

Tempus founder Eric Lefkofsky has spent the last 20 years as a serial entrepreneur helping make sense of data in industries where there is not a lot of technology. And while he never planned to move into healthcare, his plans changed when his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer and he experienced a healthcare system that lacked the technology and infrastructure to help physicians make better decisions and personalize treatments for their patients. For someone who had spent much of his life building companies around data, he saw a massive opportunity to find a data-driven approach to cancer treatment.

And he responded. Eric and the team at Tempus built the world’s largest library of clinical and molecular data to help physicians deliver data-driven precision medicine. Doctors are able to search the database to determine how certain cancers have responded to particular treatments and use those findings to design personalized courses of treatment for patients.

Tempus has also spent the last few years building a series of data pipelines by developing partnerships with the nation’s premier research hospitals to collect, cleanse, and analyze data, at a scale that can power clinical and research applications to support decision making and revolutionary academic research. For now, the company is focused on cancer, but in the near future, they hope to replicate what they’ve achieved in cancer for other diseases.

What I like even more about Tempus is that it’s based in Chicago, where healthcare is close to a $69.7 billion industry. Eric didn’t need to go to Silicon Valley, he had the support of a growing innovation ecosystem that also had the sector expertise he required. In this Third Wave of technology, more entrepreneurs will move to rising cities that have industry knowledge and know-how. With healthcare, that may mean getting closer to places like the Cleveland Clinic or Johns Hopkins or MD Anderson — world class institutions that have the talent, data and credibility a burgeoning company in healthcare needs to really take off.

The problem Tempus is tackling is big, but entrepreneurs like Eric see this as a huge opportunity to transform a segment of our economy and improve the way doctors approach treating disease. Big data promises to revolutionize healthcare in the years to come, unearthing once-invisible patterns that create roadmaps for treatment. With today’s announcement, it’s clear that the Tempus team is bringing us closer to that future.