After a quarter century as a serial entrepreneur, Eric Lefkofsky wants his latest unicorn, health tech firm Tempus AI, to be the “enduring legacy” of his career. Here’s how he hopes it will dramatically change millions of patients’ lives.
Lefkofsky took the now 2,300-person company public this summer at a valuation of $6 billion, renaming it Tempus AI when he did so. It generated $600 million in revenue in the year through June, but isn’t yet profitable. Net loss for the period was $720 million, more than half of which was an accounting loss tied to converting preferred stock to common stock at the IPO.
“I have never been afraid to act. It is one of my greatest strengths in business. When I have an idea or reach a conclusion, I act on it, immediately and without reservation,” Lefkofsky wrote in the blog post. Along the way, Lefkofsky and his longtime business partner Keywell leaned into being investors, setting up venture capital firm Lightbank, which now has more than $700 million invested in nearly 100 companies.Tempus has been a departure from everything this serial entrepreneur had subscribed to throughout his first two decades in business.
Tempus gets a bit more than half of its revenue from genetically analyzing patient samples sent by doctors and hospitals. A doctor using Tempus might find a tumor in a patient, then send a little slice of it to one of Tempus’ labs in Chicago, Atlanta or Raleigh for genomic sequencing to help explain the specific gene mutations driving tumor growth. Tempus then analyzes the results with its 200-petabyte machine-learning-trained dataset of similar patients’ lab tests and clinical data.