Tempus AI

Tempus AI (NASDAQ: TEM), founded by Eric Lefkofsky in Chicago in August 2015, is a precision-medicine company that sells two things. The first is laboratory diagnostics, above all genomic sequencing tests that oncologists order to match cancer patients with targeted therapies. The second is access to its database of de-identified patient records, which drugmakers license together with its Lens research software and analysis services. It appears here as an AI vendor rather than an adopter: it sells FDA-cleared AI software and an AI assistant for physicians, although laboratory testing is still the larger part of the business.

Its defining pattern is a test-to-data flywheel. Every test it runs adds matched clinical and molecular records to the database it licenses, and in its annual report filed in February 2026 Tempus says that database holds more than 8.6 million de-identified patient records and about 1.4 billion documents, which it structures with large language model tools. The clearest machine learning is in its algorithmic diagnostics. The FDA cleared Tempus ECG-AF, which flags patients at raised risk of atrial fibrillation from a routine electrocardiogram, in June 2024, then ECG-Low EF in July 2025 and ECG-PH, for pulmonary hypertension, in August 2026. Tempus One is an AI assistant inside Hub, the physician app, that answers questions about a patient's test report.

It is also an acquirer. In February 2025 it bought Ambry Genetics, a hereditary cancer testing lab, for 375 million dollars in cash plus stock, and in March 2025 Deep 6 AI, which matches patients to clinical trials. In August 2025 it acquired Paige, the digital pathology company, mostly in stock; Paige's prostate cancer software received FDA authorization in September 2021, which Tempus describes as the first FDA-cleared AI application in pathology. In July 2026 Tempus agreed to acquire Personalis, which makes a tumor-informed test for minimal residual disease (MRD), the traces of cancer left after treatment. That deal needs Personalis shareholder and regulatory approval and had not closed as of September 2026.

Drugmakers supply the data revenue. In April 2025 AstraZeneca and Pathos AI agreed to build an oncology foundation model on Tempus data: Pathos will pay Tempus 200 million dollars in data license fees over three years, and AstraZeneca a further 35 million dollars. Pathos is a related party, co-founded and chaired by Lefkofsky. Tempus says it delivered the first version of the model to AstraZeneca by July 2026. Recursion has licensed Tempus oncology data since November 2023, under an agreement worth up to 160 million dollars through November 2028 that it can pay in its own stock. Merck & Co. signed a multi-year deal for data and Lens in March 2026, and in April 2026 Gilead expanded its relationship to enterprise-wide Lens access. BioNTech signed a new deal in the second quarter of 2026.

The honest framing: Tempus's value rests on a large, growing clinical laboratory business and on how well it can keep licensing the data that business generates, with AI as the lever that turns records into sellable products. The dataset figures are its own, and the foundation model's scientific payoff is still unmeasured. Its own filings warn that foundation models could reduce customers' need to license raw data. It also faces patent suits from Guardant Health over its liquid biopsy and cancer-monitoring tests, and proposed class actions in Illinois under the state's genetic privacy law. It contrasts with IQVIA, which sells real-world data and analytics without running the tests, with Illumina, which sells the sequencing instruments labs depend on, and with PathAI, a pathology AI rival to the Paige business Tempus now owns.