Who Owns Osmosis?

Shiv Gaglani and Ryan Haynes met as first-year medical students at Johns Hopkins in the fall of 2011. Frustrated by the cram-and-forget rhythm of medical education, they built a crowdsourced quizzing tool for their classmates, then took a leave of absence after their preclinical years to develop it full time under the legal name Knowledge Diffusion.

Early milestones came fast. The team joined the DreamIt Health incubator in Philadelphia in 2013, growing from 200 to 5,000 users during the program, then won the 2014 Milken-Penn GSE Education Business Plan Competition, the most prestigious edtech business plan prize. The company settled back in Baltimore's Brewers Hill neighborhood and shifted its model toward short animated videos explaining medical concepts, distributed free on YouTube and Wikipedia.

The video strategy worked at unusual scale. By the time of the Elsevier sale in 2021 the channel had passed two million YouTube subscribers, accumulated more than a quarter-billion views, and spread to 195 countries, with more than 150 institutional partnerships. The Osmosis Medical Education Fellowship built a network of thousands of student contributors worldwide.

Inside Elsevier, the platform was folded into the Global Medical Education portfolio alongside products like ClinicalKey and Sherpath. Gaglani stayed through the transition before returning to finish his medical degree. In 2025 Osmosis marked ten years of operation with the platform still expanding under the tagline of raising the line on health education capacity.