# David Sontag

> David Sontag is the co-founder and CEO of Layer Health, a Boston-area startup building an AI layer that reads and abstracts messy medical charts at clinician-level accuracy. He is also a professor at MIT in EECS and IMES, a principal investigator at CSAIL, and a leader in machine learning for healthcare with more than 20,000 citations across roughly 140 publications. After a decade of academic research turning raw clinical data into predictions, he took partial leave in 2025 to scale Layer Health, which raised a $21M Series A led by Define Ventures.

- **Role:** Co-founder & CEO at Layer Health; Professor at MIT (EECS / IMES)
- **Organizations:** Layer Health, MIT (EECS), MIT Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), MIT Jameel Clinic (J-Clinic)
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** B.A., Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D., Computer Science (advisor: Tommi Jaakkola), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
- **Known for:** Co-founded and leads Layer Health, an AI platform for medical chart review, Raised a $21M Series A (March 2025) led by Define Ventures with GV, Flare Capital Partners and MultiCare Capital Partners, More than 20,000 citations across roughly 140 publications in AI and ML

## Career timeline

- **2010** — Earned Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT; received the George M. Sprowls Award for best doctoral thesis
- **2010-2011** — Postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England
- **2011-2016** — Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at NYU's Courant Institute
- **2017** — Joined MIT faculty as Hermann L. F. von Helmholtz Career Development Professor (IMES) and Assistant Professor (EECS)
- **2023** — Co-founded Layer Health with former MIT students; raised $4M seed (GV, General Catalyst, Inception Health)
- **2025** — Took partial leave from MIT to serve as CEO; Layer Health raised $21M Series A led by Define Ventures

## Achievements

- Co-founded and leads Layer Health, an AI platform for medical chart review
- Raised a $21M Series A (March 2025) led by Define Ventures with GV, Flare Capital Partners and MultiCare Capital Partners
- More than 20,000 citations across roughly 140 publications in AI and ML
- George M. Sprowls Award for best doctoral thesis in Computer Science at MIT (2010)
- Best paper awards at EMNLP, UAI and NIPS/NeurIPS
- Faculty research awards from Google, Facebook and Adobe
- NSF CAREER Award
- Named von Helmholtz Career Development Professor at MIT

## Latest updates

- **2025-03** — Layer Health raised $21M Series A led by Define Ventures with GV, Flare Capital Partners and MultiCare Capital Partners.
- **2025-03** — Sontag is on partial leave from MIT to serve full-time energy as CEO of Layer Health.

## Links

- Website: https://layerhealth.com
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/david-sontag
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/layerhealth
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@mitclinicalmachinelearning2196

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/david-sontag
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-13