Latest news with #ShivRao
Technical.ly
25-06-2025
- Business
- Technical.ly
Abridge secures $300M, doubling valuation and fueling national expansion
Health transcription giant Abridge has secured a $300 million raise backed by high-profile investors. Venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures led the round, the Pittsburgh-based startup announced yesterday, bringing Abridge's valuation to roughly $5.3 billion. The multimillion-dollar investment will power its partnerships with over 150 health corporations across the US. Abridge's product, an AI tool that it says it hopes to reduce burnout by simplifying medical discussions with patients, will support around 50 million medical conversations this year, according to a blog post announcing the raise. 'Every medical conversation is rich with the signals our healthcare system depends on,' CEO and co-founder Shiv Rao said in the post. 'Abridge activates those signals in the background, silently handling the complexity so clinicians can focus on the human moments that matter.' The additional funding will be used to scale its AI platform, spokesperson Emily Eng said on behalf of Abridge. It hopes to eliminate the need for coordination between clinicians and billing teams and ultimately make revenue cycle management teams' jobs more efficient, among other things. The news comes after a Series D raise of $250 million brought the company's value to $2.75 billion in February. Abridge doubles its valuation in just four months Given its massive jump in funding since its Series D round in February, Abridge has shown steady growth. The latest round nearly doubled the company's valuation in just a four-month span. In total, the company has raised more than $800 million since it was founded in 2018, according to PitchBook. Abridge has so far been at the top of Pittsburgh's venture capital raises in recent years, raking in nearly half of Pittsburgh's decade-high $689 million raised in Q1 2025. In the first quarter of 2024, Abridge was also leading Pittsburgh's fundraising. It was responsible for more than half of all regional venture capital raised in Q1 of that year. Prior to that, Abridge was among the top five earners in the final quarter of 2023. Since significantly boosting Pittsburgh's startup fundraising scene, Abridge has been open about looking to other cities for new hires. The most recent raise announcement comes after Abridge said in March that it was moving to hire in San Francisco, citing a need to hire 'hundreds' to meet current demand. 'Pittsburgh continues to be a hub,' Eng said, 'for key cross-functional talent in machine learning, clinical science and partner success at Abridge.'
TechCrunch
24-06-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
In just 4 months, AI medical scribe Abridge doubles valuation to $5.3B
In Brief Abridge, an AI startup automating medical notes, has secured a $300 million Series E at a $5.3 billion valuation, according to the Wall Street Journal. The round, led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Khosla Ventures, follows the company's $250 million February fundraise at a $2.75 billion valuation. The seven-year-old Abridge is widely considered to be the leader in the increasingly crowded AI-powered medical scribe market, largely due to its early entry and integration with Epic Systems, the dominant health record software. In Q1, Abridge has reached $117 million in contracted annual recurring revenue (a metric that includes all signed recurring contacts, including from customers that have still not been onboarded,) The Information reported last month. Along with the fundraise, Abridge announced that it is expanding into converting medical notes from patient appointments into AI-powered medical codes, an offering that makes the company directly competitive with startups like CodaMetrix and a feature from its partner Epic Systems. Abridge, which was founded by cardiologist Shiv Rao, claims that its AI scribe technology is used by over 150 of the largest health systems in the US.
Wall Street Journal
24-06-2025
- Health
- Wall Street Journal
Abridge, Whose AI App Takes Notes for Doctors, Valued at $5.3 Billion at Funding
Abridge, a startup that has automated doctors' note-taking with artificial intelligence, on Tuesday said it had raised $300 million in funding. The round, led by venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Khosla Ventures, values the startup at $5.3 billion. In February, Abridge raised $250 million at a valuation of $2.75 billion. The new capital infusion will go to hiring scientists, machine-learning experts and software developers who will focus on developing new products and building advanced AI infrastructure to support large customers, said Co-founder and Chief Executive Dr. Shiv Rao. The fundraise comes at a time where so-called ambient-listening tech, which tunes in to the exchanges between doctor and patient and then transcribes the conversations, is gaining traction at hospitals and health systems. The technology is lauded for reducing physician burnout—an increasing problem for overworked doctors—and allows them to spend more time focused on patients without needing to scribble notes after hours. Abridge's technology is now used in over 150 large health systems nationwide, the startup said, expanding from just a handful a few years ago when the Pittsburgh- and San Francisco-based startup was still piloting its technology with a few hospitals, said Rao. 'Since then, we've seen healthcare take up generative AI-centered solutions faster than any other industry,' he said. Abridge will support more than 50 million medical conversations this year, it said. The rapid growth of generative AI-based services and products has meant that nearly every sector—from financial services and life sciences to the skilled trades—is starting to be transformed by the technology. But wide-scale adoption doesn't necessarily keep step with deployment. For instance, about 800 of Yale New Haven Health System's roughly 3,000 employed physicians are actively using Abridge's platform, though that number is expected to double in the coming year, said Dr. Lee Schwamm, the health system's senior vice president and chief digital health officer. But of those doctors who do use Abridge, 60% to 70% continue to do so, Schwamm said, and they report a major reduction in burnout. 'It will become imperative for our physicians to use it, just like we require physicians to use the electronic health record,' Schwamm said. Matt Kull, chief information and digital strategy officer of Inova Health System, said the Northern Virginia-based health system is expanding the use of Abridge's product from its 2,000 doctors to include its 6,000 nurses. Soon, nurses will be able to walk through in-patient suites and check vitals while talking to an Abridge-connected device, Kull said. Over the past few years, Abridge's technology, which was launched in 2018, has become more sophisticated alongside the advanced AI models that power it, recognizing hard-to-pronounce medical terms and also generating notes relevant to each specialty, Rao said. The company also has expanded the AI's ability to access a patient's prior records and notes so it can prepare its own records according to the doctor's preferences. As part of its fundraise, Abridge is also embedding the checking and validating of medical billing codes during patient conversations, making documentation more compliant and simplifying processes like coding, billing and auditing. While Abridge's technology has evolved, so, too, have its competitors. Microsoft in 2022 acquired Nuance, a leading player in the 'AI scribe' arena. Other competitors include Ambience Healthcare, Suki AI, Onpoint Healthcare Partners and Nabla. With AI-based listening tools, there are concerns over patient privacy and data security—and in using AI without human supervision. Kull, of Inova Health System, said one of the health system's primary concerns is the responsible use of AI in its areas of practice. 'We look at this as assistive, not autonomous,' he said. 'We want artificial intelligence to provide prompting, to provide automated keystrokes, but we leave the true clinical decision-making to our physicians.' Write to Belle Lin at
CNBC
10-06-2025
- Business
- CNBC
47. Abridge
Founders: Shiv Rao (CEO), Zack LiptonLaunched: 2018Headquarters: Pittsburgh, PennsylvaniaFunding: $462.5 millionValuation: $2.7 billionKey Technologies: Artificial intelligence, generative AIIndustry: Health carePrevious appearances on Disruptor 50 list: 0 Skyrocketing rates of burnout among doctors during the pandemic highlighted a huge problem and patient risk. Abridge offers a generative AI platform that is designed to reduce physician burnout levels, a note-taking tool that doctors can rely on during conversations with patients, saving them valuable time that too often has been sucked up by documentation. "After I see a patient, I have to write notes, I have to place orders, I have to think about the patient summary," Abridge founder Dr. Shiv Rao told CNBC at a 2024 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference. The Abridge technology, Rao said, "allows me to focus on the person in front of me — the most important person, the patient — because when I hit start, have a conversation, then hit stop, I can swivel my chair and within seconds, the note's there." Abridge's platform is able to structure these notes into draft medical records in outpatient, inpatient and emergency medicine settings. Doctors can then double check these generated visit summaries and medical orders before signing off on them. But Abridge is more than just a transcription tool. The platform is also able to match medical issues with insurance billing codes, along with drafting medical orders. With a feature called Linked Evidence, the information sources used to generate Abridge's medical summaries can be found and verified by physicians. In 2024, Abridge announced a new health system enterprise customer nearly every week, according to a report by Contrary Research. Some of Abridge's most recent customers include Mayo Clinic, Duke Health, UNC Health and Johns Hopkins Medicine. The company has partnered with Nvidia to further develop Abridge's ability to understand multilingual conversations between doctors and patients. The software is now able to recognize almost 100 languages. Abridge says that physicians who use its platform at River Health have seen as much as a 55% decrease in burnout. Burnout levels have come back down to pre-Covid levels, according to American Medical Association data, but it remains a huge issue in healthcare. In 2024, approximately 43% of physicians reported burnout, which was down from over 48% in 2022. Physicians are also at a higher risk for burnout compared to other U.S. workers, according to a study published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings. Abridge is just one of the many companies trying to make a name for itself in the booming market for AI medical scribing tools. Competition for Abridge ranges from other startups like Freed and Suki, to tech giants like Microsoft's Nuance Communications, which recently launched an interface update available in the U.S. and Canada. Fellow Disruptor Rad AI also offers written summaries as part of its AI tools for radiologists. "It'll be incumbent upon us to make sure that we're able to demonstrate differentiation," Rao told CNBC. "So far, we've had good luck these last few years doing that."
Time Magazine
08-05-2025
- Health
- Time Magazine
Shiv Rao
Much of what inspires people to go to medical school or nursing school is the opportunity—the "privilege," as Dr. Shiv Rao sees it—to serve patients while building strong relationships with them. But the reality of the job often means being consumed with paperwork for hours after the last appointment of the day. That's why Rao, a practicing cardiologist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center with an interest in machine learning, founded Abridge, which uses AI to turn doctors' conversations with patients into billable clinical notes that are integrated directly into health records. The tool works by recording a patient's visit (with their consent), automatically transcribing it, and creating a useful summary. 'Abridge unburdens clinicians from the clerical work that crushes their souls, so they can focus on the person in front of them,' says CEO Rao. Abridge is now used at more than 100 health systems across the U.S., including Kaiser Permanente, Duke Health, Johns Hopkins Medicine, and UChicago Medicine. Rao expects that growth to continue: In February, the company raised $250 million, which it will funnel into research and development. It also started rolling out a product built for nurses at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona. The same month, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association concluded that 67% of clinicians using Abridge believed their risk of burnout due to paperwork had decreased, and 77% felt the tool improved patient care. Rao recalls a rural primary care physician who wrote to the company about her experience with the tool. When she sat down to dinner with her family, her young son asked her: 'Mommy, why aren't you working right now?' The woman explained that she was using Abridge, a tool that allowed her to come home early enough for dinner—and that now, she could do so every night. 'Clinicians across the country can get their life back,' Rao says. 'But they can also hopefully deliver more empathetic care because they're more present and building better relationships.'
