Latest news with #Ambience
Business Insider
a day ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Here's the exclusive pitch deck Ambience Healthcare used to raise $243 million as the AI scribing gold rush hits new highs
Ambience Healthcare just landed a fresh megaround of funding to accelerate its growth. The startup pulled in a $243 million Series C round at the end of July, co-led by Oak HC/FT and Andreessen Horowitz. San Francisco-based Ambience sells ambient transcription software to summarize conversations between doctors and patients. Increasingly, Ambience is also automating the many administrative steps that follow, like medical coding and payment processing. It's one of the best-funded players in a sector awash with investor cash: In the first half of 2025, US healthcare AI startups pulled in 62% of the $6.4 billion invested across digital health, according to Rock Health. A16z is a previous investor in Ambience, first backing the company's Series A, according to PitchBook. But the firm surprised the industry this summer by making a new investment into Ambience's closest competitor, $5.3 billion Abridge. A16z led Abridge's $300 million Series E just a month before Ambience's raise. The firm's double-dipping, a practice that's usually taboo in venture capital, underscores just how frenzied the Silicon Valley gold rush for healthcare AI scribes has become. And the industry is about to face a big shake-up — electronic health records giant Epic plans to release its own AI scribe this month, Politico reported. Epic didn't respond to requests for comment on the reports. Cofounder and chief scientist Nikhil Buduma said in a statement to Business Insider that Ambience is "looking forward to the announcement," arguing that the launch will help Ambience further stand out from the crowd as the startup helps complex academic health systems save money across a range of capabilities. "Epic entering the game will likely help reduce the amount of noise in our market by accelerating the consolidation of low-cost, low-value players who haven't shown the ability to extend beyond simple ambulatory specialties," he said. Ambience was always intended to be more than an AI scribing startup, cofounder and CEO Michael Ng told Business Insider. When the startup raised its seed round in 2020, it included two products in its pitch deck that it planned to build in tandem: one for ambient scribing, and one that would use AI to derive medical codes from clinical notes — a critical step in ensuring doctors get paid by insurance companies for the care they provide. Ambience has over 40 health system customers, including top players like the Cleveland Clinic and Memorial Hermann Health System, and all of them use its scribing tool. The startup has released adjacent products for medical coding and other administrative tasks that its founders say are easy for providers to add on. It's also automating referrals, pre-visit patient summaries, and medical orders like lab tests and prescriptions. When asked about A16z's investment in Abridge, Ng said A16z doesn't sit on Ambience's board, and praised general partner Julie Yoo, who he said has provided crucial support to Ambience from its earliest stages. "It's hard for us to speak on other parts of the other funds that decided to make their own choices," he said. Ambience's existing investors, The OpenAI Startup Fund, Kleiner Perkins, and Optum Ventures, also participated in its Series C. While Ambience has substantially expanded its product lines in the five years since its founding, Ng said the company has built about 10% of the offerings on its road map. But as the tech accelerates, Buduma said, Ambience is a year or two away from fully automating all administrative tasks for providers. "We're sitting here with a clear line of sight to a world where a clinician walks into the room, you can have a conversation with the patient, and everything else is automated in the background by the AI platform," said Buduma. "All of a sudden, you're liberated from the keyboard, and you just get to talk to the patient in front of you." Here's the 15-slide pitch deck Ambience Healthcare used to raise $243 million.
Business Insider
a day ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Here's the exclusive pitch deck Ambience Healthcare used to raise $243 million as the AI scribing gold rush hits new highs
The race to dominate AI-powered medical transcription is speeding up. Ambience Healthcare just landed a fresh megaround of funding to accelerate its growth. The startup pulled in a $243 million Series C round at the end of July, co-led by Oak HC/FT and Andreessen Horowitz. San Francisco-based Ambience sells ambient transcription software to summarize conversations between doctors and patients. Increasingly, Ambience is also automating the many administrative steps that follow, like medical coding and payment processing. It's one of the best-funded players in a sector awash with investor cash: In the first half of 2025, US healthcare AI startups pulled in 62% of the $6.4 billion invested across digital health, according to Rock Health. A16z is a previous investor in Ambience, first backing the company's Series A, according to PitchBook. But the firm surprised the industry this summer by making a new investment into Ambience's closest competitor, $5.3 billion Abridge. A16z led Abridge's $300 million Series E just a month before Ambience's raise. The firm's double-dipping, a practice that's usually taboo in venture capital, underscores just how frenzied the Silicon Valley gold rush for healthcare AI scribes has become. And the industry is about to face a big shake-up — electronic health records giant Epic plans to release its own AI scribe this month, Politico reported. Epic didn't respond to requests for comment on the reports. Cofounder and chief scientist Nikhil Buduma said in a statement to Business Insider that Ambience is "looking forward to the announcement," arguing that the launch will help Ambience further stand out from the crowd as the startup helps complex academic health systems save money across a range of capabilities. "Epic entering the game will likely help reduce the amount of noise in our market by accelerating the consolidation of low-cost, low-value players who haven't shown the ability to extend beyond simple ambulatory specialties," he said. Ambience was always intended to be more than an AI scribing startup, cofounder and CEO Michael Ng told Business Insider. When the startup raised its seed round in 2020, it included two products in its pitch deck that it planned to build in tandem: one for ambient scribing, and one that would use AI to derive medical codes from clinical notes — a critical step in ensuring doctors get paid by insurance companies for the care they provide. Ambience has over 40 health system customers, including top players like the Cleveland Clinic and Memorial Hermann Health System, and all of them use its scribing tool. The startup has released adjacent products for medical coding and other administrative tasks that its founders say are easy for providers to add on. It's also automating referrals, pre-visit patient summaries, and medical orders like lab tests and prescriptions. When asked about A16z's investment in Abridge, Ng said A16z doesn't sit on Ambience's board, and praised general partner Julie Yoo, who he said has provided crucial support to Ambience from its earliest stages. "It's hard for us to speak on other parts of the other funds that decided to make their own choices," he said. Ambience's existing investors, The OpenAI Startup Fund, Kleiner Perkins, and Optum Ventures, also participated in its Series C. While Ambience has substantially expanded its product lines in the five years since its founding, Ng said the company has built about 10% of the offerings on its road map. But as the tech accelerates, Buduma said, Ambience is a year or two away from fully automating all administrative tasks for providers. "We're sitting here with a clear line of sight to a world where a clinician walks into the room, you can have a conversation with the patient, and everything else is automated in the background by the AI platform," said Buduma. "All of a sudden, you're liberated from the keyboard, and you just get to talk to the patient in front of you." Here's the 15-slide pitch deck Ambience Healthcare used to raise $243 million. Ambience Healthcare Ambience Healthcare Ambience Healthcare Ambience Healthcare Ambience Healthcare Ambience Healthcare Ambience Healthcare Ambience Healthcare Ambience Healthcare
Business Insider
5 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
$5.3 billion Abridge wants to make acquisitions. Here's what the healthcare AI startup is looking for.
Abridge is on a hot streak. Now, as the healthcare startup competes in the AI talent wars, it's preparing to go on a shopping spree. Abridge, which builds AI-powered software to transcribe and summarize patient-doctor conversations, landed a $300 million round in June led by Andreessen Horowitz. It was its second mega-raise in four months; the company had raked in a $250 million round in February. In 18 months, Abridge has raised $700 million in total and boosted its valuation from $850 million to $5.3 billion. Abridge CEO and cofounder Dr. Shiv Rao has big plans for all of that capital, he told Business Insider. "We've got a lot of money in the bank, and we want to spend 80% of it just going deeper, and expanding from connecting conversations to clinical notes into claims, clinical decision support, and care management," he said. With 80% of its cash reserved for doubling down on its tech, Abridge is earmarking the remaining 20% for potential acquisitions, Rao said. Those deals are looking increasingly critical in the brutal, competitive landscape of ambient healthcare scribes. Perhaps the most gutting release is set to come from Epic, the electronic health record giant that first partnered with Abridge back in 2023 in a watershed moment for the startup. Epic is now gearing up to launch an AI scribe of its own, Politico reported this month. Abridge declined to comment on the reports. Epic didn't respond to requests for comment. Epic's launch would follow healthcare startup Ambience, Abridge's biggest direct competitor, raising its own mega-round this summer. Ambience's $250 million Series C was co-led by Oak HC/FT and A16z, a longtime investor in Ambience that appears to be double-dipping in AI scribing with its growth investment in Abridge. And, as Abridge works to expand beyond scribing to use AI for tasks like processing medical bills, it's running up against private equity firms like New Mountain Capital pouring billions into their healthcare AI plays. Abridge has remained a frontrunner as the pressure builds. It's now working with over 150 large health systems, Rao said. The startup is also partnering closely with some of those health systems on its new products — Abridge said Tuesday it's collaborating with Pittsburgh health system Highmark Health on tech to automate prior authorization requests. And Abridge is focusing squarely on the patient-provider conversation as the starting point for each of its new tools or acquisition targets, Rao said. "The last thing we want to do is to become a company that's opening up a trench coat and selling you random things that have no coherence to our mission," he said. "But if there are things that are absolutely on our road map, it would be smart for us to have open ears." Eyeing fresh talent and tech As San Francisco-based Abridge has landed fundraise after fundraise, many startups hoping to get acquired by Abridge have entered Rao's inbox. While Rao said Abridge isn't "in talks" with any particular company, it's prepared to notch deals to grow faster. The startup hasn't made any acquisitions since its 2018 founding. "It feels like a lot of companies are asking if they can join us in some way. We need to be able to spend on things like that — data plays, ecosystem plays, and partnerships," Rao said. Acquiring top talent is Abridge's biggest priority, Rao said, adding that the startup has been competing with AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic in its recent hiring efforts. The AI talent wars are raising the stakes for startups like Abridge. As Big Tech companies fight over top AI researchers, including by offering pay packages in the millions or tens of millions, startups are touting their mission-centric approaches to convince engineers to join their teams over tech giants. Rao thinks Abridge can compete effectively for AI talent by offering hires the rare chance to build tools that matter, tech that actually improves people's health. "Finding ways to recruit more world-class talent as fast as possible is really, really important for us," he said. "If this is the legacy you want to leave, if you want to be a part of a company where every single day you can feel really good that you improved patient care, then we're going to resonate more than those horizontal technology companies." Abridge has about 330 employees, a number Rao is aiming to increase massively, especially in its engineering department, though he says the company won't rely exclusively on M&A to do that. Abridge builds its own large-language models that its widening suite of software sits upon. Those models make up its "contextual reasoning engine," which automates clinical notetaking that can combine ambient scribing with relevant context from the patient's existing health records and generate actionable outputs like medical orders and suggested billing codes. Rao said Abridge is considering buying data where necessary to continue training its models. With a combination build-and-buy strategy, Abridge is moving further into revenue cycle management, the hottest ticket item in healthcare AI, since it aims to help health systems capture more revenue while saving time for doctors. Rao said Abridge is also working on areas like risk adjustment, the process of estimating a patient's expected medical costs, that is critical for value-based care arrangements, and care coordination. Abridge wants to dig deeper into clinical decision support, too, a field that many healthcare startups have stayed away from, as the tech often walks a thin line to avoid facing FDA regulations. Abridge first stepped into the space in October by partnering with medical insights company UpToDate to surface relevant clinical evidence in Abridge's generated notes. Rao said he expects Abridge to share more information from the partnership later this year. As Abridge looks to take over more tasks for doctors, the company is being deliberate about how and when it'll meet "good friction" like FDA regulation, Rao said. "As we move into higher-stakes workflows from a patient outcomes perspective, we have to be really, really responsible," he said. "We try to be as transparent as we possibly can on how our models work and how we evaluate them. We'll need to continue to be transparent as we get into those new spaces."
Telegraph
7 days ago
- Telegraph
The seven best cruises for families to book now
Key stops: Cádiz, Malaga, Gibraltar Departure port: Tilbury, London Duration: 13 nights Ship: Ambience There are no kids' clubs on board the British cruise line Ambassador's adult-only ship Ambience, but popular multi-generational sailings during school holidays allow for memorable family-bonding time. (Children of all ages are welcome with a minimum age of six months). This is classic cruising on a mid-size 1,400-passenger ship – think music, quizzes and arts and crafts rather than waterslides and climbing walls. However, there is a pool, a pair of hot tubs, an outdoor movie screen and an old-fashioned card room where my children enjoyed playing rummy after dinner. Elsewhere, tennis fans will love the Wimbledon purple and green décor as well as the Centre Court atrium and SW19 bar. Ambassador offers excellent value, with top-notch food and excursions that won't break the bank. This cruise offers a mix of history, culture and beaches, stopping at, among others, Cádiz for baroque palaces; Malaga for its world class art; and Gibraltar, where you'll find a stunning 7.5-mile coastline. Bring buckets and spades. Insider tip Inside cabins are fairly spacious, sleep four, have excellent storage space and are a great budget option for families. How to do it A 13-night Multi-generational escape to Spain and Portugal costs from £1,359pp for an inside cabin, departing on August 15, 2026. Includes all meals and entertainment (
Politico
07-08-2025
- Business
- Politico
Epic takes notes
BUSINESS PLAN Epic, the company that manages electronic health records for nearly half of U.S. hospitals, is expected to announce new technology this month that automatically transcribes doctors' notes during patient visits, according to two doctors, a health industry group representative and a venture capitalist with knowledge of the announcement, granted anonymity to discuss the news. The move could reshape a market that's so far been dominated by relative outsiders, such as the startup Abridge and Microsoft-owned Nuance. Note-taking artificial intelligence tools, known as ambient scribes, are becoming increasingly popular in health care. Over 70 percent of practice leaders report some use of AI for patient visits, according to an August poll run by the Medical Group Management Association, which represents health care administrators. Late to the game: Epic is not the first of its peers to launch its own AI scribe. The company has previously partnered with Microsoft and Abridge, integrating their ambient scribes within their platform. But other electronic health records have already moved in this direction. Athenahealth offers its own version of ambient notes, as do Oracle and Elation, an EHR that supports smaller clinician offices. In 2024, Epic had 42.3 percent of the U.S. hospital market, according to health IT market analyst KLAS Research. At roughly 46 years old, the company continues to gain market share. One of Epic's advantages is that it offers many free tools. A time-saver: Ambient scribes can significantly reduce the time doctors spend on paperwork, giving them more face time with their patients. For example, Kaiser Permanente Group's clinicians saved more than 15,700 hours in one year when they used an ambient scribe — the equivalent of 1,794 working days — compared with nonusers, according to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in March. But the tools can be expensive, ranging in price from $100 to $400 per doctor per month. Brendan Keeler, head of health interoperability at tech consultancy HTD Health, predicted that 20 percent of Epic's EHR users will start using the company's new AI scribe soon after launch.. 'It'll underperform to start, and they'll slowly improve it and erode existing players' market share,' said Keeler. Ambient scribe players have been bolstering their cash reserves. Earlier this year, Abridge raised $300 million while competitors Suki AI and Nabla each raised $70 million. Last week, Ambience, another prominent ambient scribe, announced it raised $243 million. Still, Julie Yoo, a general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz who invested in Ambience, said these companies may still have an advantage. 'One competitive edge that the best-of-breed ambient scribe companies might have is that individual physicians have been granted a lot of agency in the upfront product evaluation processes,' she told Ruth. 'Which means product quality, accuracy, and user experience actually really matters in terms of what ultimately gets selected.' WELCOME TO FUTURE PULSE This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has signed a law that bans people from using AI for mental health and therapeutic decision-making. The law is designed to stop the use of AI chatbots as therapists. Share any thoughts, news, tips and feedback with Danny Nguyen at dnguyen@ Carmen Paun at cpaun@ Ruth Reader at rreader@ or Erin Schumaker at eschumaker@ Want to share a tip securely? Message us on Signal: Dannyn516.70, CarmenP.82, RuthReader.02 or ErinSchumaker.01. EXAM ROOM Health care executives are raising concerns about the lack of privacy safeguards around consumer health tools as the Trump administration seeks to increase the use of AI and digital health apps in patient care. Patient health data has been protected for decades by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), a law that requires doctors, health insurance, and health clinics and their vendors to secure patient health data. 'HIPAA does not protect my data coming off of my ring or my watch or other wearables,' Deborah DiSanzo Eldracher, president of Best Buy Health, which works with hospitals to set up remote health monitoring in patients' homes, said this week at a panel discussion on AI in health care at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. 'We're just really in need of some federal health care data privacy regulation, because we don't have it.' As POLITICO reported last week, the Trump administration has buy-in from many in the health and tech industries to free up data so patients could input their medical records into apps and artificial intelligence programs that can help inform choices they make about their diet, fitness and health. It's unclear how well those apps protect patient data. Congress has not passed a general privacy law that would include consumer health information generated on wearables or stored in apps. As a result, 20 states have approved their own privacy laws. Dusadee Sarangarm, chief medical information officer, University of New Mexico Health, who also spoke at the Harvard event, said that having to comply with myriad state laws presents a challenge for app developers. 'If every single airport you went through had a different set of security measures, had different criteria, had different set ups, it would be chaos,' said Sarangarm. 'That's what our vendors have to go through. That keeps innovation down.'
