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Tempus is a health-tech company that uses AI to analyze patient medical data and help doctors pick better treatments, especially for cancer.
Tempus is a health technology company that tries to turn messy medical data into useful answers for doctors. It started in cancer care, where picking the right drug can depend on reading a tumor's genes correctly, and it has since spread into other areas like heart health, mental health, and even checking whether a patient carries a genetic risk for disease. The core idea is simple: gather lots of clinical and molecular data, run it through software and AI, and hand doctors and drugmakers insights they can actually use.
The company makes money in two main ways. First, it sells lab tests. A doctor orders a test, a patient's tumor or blood sample gets sequenced, and Tempus returns a report that matches the patient's biology to possible treatments. Insurers and hospitals pay for these tests, though Tempus has often booked revenue before collecting the cash, which is a real risk if insurers push back. Second, it sells data and services to big drug companies. Tempus has amassed one of the largest libraries of linked clinical and genomic records in the country, and pharmaceutical firms pay to mine it for trial design, drug targeting, and research. It also runs something called "Trials," which helps match patients to clinical trials, and "Next," a tool that helps doctors find the right test. Competitors include Guardant Health in blood-based cancer testing and Foundation Medicine (owned by Roche), plus a long tail of lab and data players. What makes Tempus interesting, and a little scary, is that it burns a lot of money. It went public in 2024 and has grown revenue fast through acquisitions — it bought Ambry Genetics, a genetic testing lab, and Paige, a digital pathology company — but it has consistently lost money. Founder and CEO Eric Lefkofsky is a serial entrepreneur (he co-founded Groupon), and he has bet heavily on scale: the more data Tempus collects, the more valuable its AI and its data business become. That is the bull case. The bear case is that testing is a competitive, low-margin grind, insurers are stingy, and the AI story has to eventually show up in the numbers.
Eric Lefkofsky started Tempus after his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. He saw a problem: doctors were making cancer decisions without an easy way to bring together a patient's genetic data and their medical history. His idea was a platform that combined both, so treatments could be matched to the specific tumor in front of them. That idea came out of a business he had founded called Bioin, which he turned into a corporation in 2015.
The company was renamed Tempus Health that same year, then Tempus Labs in 2016, and finally Tempus AI in 2023. The name changes tracked the company's shifting strategy more than any single product.
In early 2023, the company renamed itself Tempus AI. The timing lined up with the global wave of excitement around artificial intelligence after ChatGPT. Critics said the rebrand was mostly a market move to attach an AI premium to the business.
Tempus listed its shares on Nasdaq in June 2024, raising hundreds of millions of dollars. The IPO turned preferred shares into common stock and gave early investors a way to cash out.
In May 2025, short seller Spruce Point Capital published a report accusing Tempus of overstating its AI capabilities and inflating the value of its contracts. The stock fell about 19% in a single day. The report also raised questions about the CEO's past and about deals with related parties.
After the short report, a securities class action was filed claiming Tempus misled investors about its AI and the quality of its contracts. The suit questioned the AstraZeneca-Pathos AI deal, the SoftBank joint venture, and how Ambry handled billing. The case damaged the company's credibility around its AI story.
Tempus acquired Ambry Genetics, which added testing for hereditary and rare diseases and supplied about half of the company's revenue growth that year. Headline revenue grew 83%, but organic growth was closer to 33%—a gap that showed how much of the expansion came from buying rather than building.
In the third quarter of 2025, Tempus posted its first adjusted EBITDA-positive quarter, a small but real profit on an adjusted basis. Full-year revenue reached about 1.27 billion dollars, up roughly 83%. It was a turning point from years of losses toward making money.
Tempus agreed to pay 1.5 billion dollars for cancer diagnostics company Personalis, and the deal cleared regulatory review. The prize was stronger footing in MRD testing, which checks whether cancer has come back. MRD test volume surged to about 12,000 tests in a single quarter, up 300% from a year earlier.
Data licensing and AI modeling bookings passed 550 million dollars, including a major deal with BMS running through 2031. Quarterly revenue rose 23% to about 411 million dollars, and data and applications revenue grew 33%. The data flywheel—testing feeding data feeding AI deals—had become a real growth engine.
The honest summary: Tempus is a fast-growing, ambitious company sitting at the intersection of lab testing and AI health data, with a genuine data advantage and a genuine cash-burn problem. It is not yet a proven money machine, but it is building something that big drugmakers and hospitals increasingly want.
Saved answer · last researched 2 Nov 2026