Tag: abridge

Abridge Moves Upstream With $300M Series E

Posted on by Jason Barry

The ambient AI segment is turning into a bigger spectacle than the NBA Finals, and Abridge just dunked on it with $300M of Series E funding.

Big-time startups have big-time valuations. The latest round doubled Abridge’s valuation to $5.3B, up from a paltry $2.5B when it closed its last nine-figure round four short months ago.

  • We’ll leave it to the VCs to decide whether Abridge is worth twice as much as it was in February, but it’s now deployed at 50% more health systems – over 150 in total.
  • Abridge also reportedly hit $117M in contracted annual recurring revenue as of Q1, and is on pace to support upwards of 50M medical conversations this year alone.

Abridge is aiming upstream. The new capital was earmarked for “automating more of what happens behind the scenes and enabling revenue cycle management teams to operate with unparalleled efficiency.” 

  • That means embedding revenue cycle intelligence earlier in the clinical conversation, and eliminating unnecessary back-and-forth between clinicians and billing teams.
  • In Abridge’s own words, the ultimate aim is to “help achieve faster reimbursement cycles and minimize the risk of denials.”

The ambient AI race needs a rebrand. As Abridge and its competitors start lunging toward every workflow within arms reach of the clinical conversation, their platforms are quickly pushing past documentation. Within just the last week:

  • Ambience Healthcare announced that its coding-aware ambient AI platform saves St. Luke’s Health System $13k+ per clinician annually, then followed that up by launching Patient Recap for pre-visit chart summaries.
  • Commure raised $200M and rounded out its RCM and documentation capabilities with AI agents that handle scheduling, referrals, and prior auths. 
  • Nabla closed $70M to build out an Adaptic Agentic Platform that enables real-time coding assistance, direct EHR commands, and new capabilities for nurses.
  • There’s also the 1,000 pound gorilla formerly known as Nuance, but the incumbent scribing champ hasn’t been too vocal since rolling out Microsoft Dragon Copilot earlier this year.

The Takeaway

The hottest segment in digital health is boiling over into revenue cycle management, and Abridge is cranking up the heat with its Series E funding. Topping off the warchest comes with golden strings attached, so expect the pace to only accelerate from here as Abridge looks to live up to its valuation by coming out on top in the RCM landgrab.

Abridge Lands $250M and Debuts Contextual Reasoning Engine

Posted on by Jason Barry

One of the top stories to come out of last week’s ViVE conference was Abridge closing $250M in Series D funding, yet that somehow wasn’t even the biggest news in the announcement.

On top of raising a nine-figure round at a $2.5B valuation, Abridge hit the 100 health system milestone after adding to a string of recent deployments at organizations like Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins.

  • Newly announced systems included Akron Children’s, Endeavor Health, Inova, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Oak Street Health.

The real headliner was the debut of Abridge’s new Contextual Reasoning Engine, “an AI architecture that produces more clinically useful and billable notes at the point of care.”

The Contextual Reasoning Engine bolsters Abridge’s generative AI platform for clinical conversations with:

  • Contextual awareness – integrates data from retrospective patient encounters, health system-specific revenue cycle guidelines, and clinician documentation preferences to create more comprehensive notes. 
  • Problem detection – recognizes and groups medical problems, describing them with language that aligns with appropriate billing codes.
  • Actionable outputs – captures medical orders and integrates them into the EHR for clinician review.

Ambient scribing has been one of the hottest segments in digital health, helping clinicians spend more face-time with patients and less pajama time on administrative tasks.

  • That’s led to rapid adoption from providers, but it’s also caused plenty of vendors with core competencies outside of scribing to bolt the functionality onto their feature sets.
  • As a result, ambient AI startups are moving beyond clinical documentation to differentiate themselves with new use cases like coding or clinical decision support – and Abridge’s Contextual Reasoning Engine is only just the beginning.

The Takeaway

The ambient AI market is at an inflection point, and companies like Abridge are quickly raising capital and pouring it straight into R&D to own the workflows downstream from documentation. It’s a race to outrun commoditization and reach distribution before incumbents can catch up, and Abridge now has another $250M to help pick up the pace.

Abridge Lands $30M As AI Race Heats Up

Posted on by Jason Barry

Momentum makes magic, and few startups have more of it than AI medical scribe Abridge after landing $30M in Series B funding from Spark Capital and high-profile strategics like CVS Health, Kaiser Permanente, and Mayo Clinic.

Abridge’s generative AI platform converts patient-provider conversations into structured note drafts in real-time, slashing hours from administrative burdens by generating summaries that rarely require further input (clinicians edit less than 9%).

The Series B is one of this year’s largest raises for pure play healthcare AI, an area that now accounts for about a quarter of all capital flowing into health IT.

One of the reasons why investors are taking such a keen interest in Abridge is its partnership hot streak, which includes Epic bringing them on as the first startup in its new Partners and Pals program – a move that will make Abridge available directly within Epic’s EHR.

  • It also probably doesn’t hurt that Abridge isn’t shy about sharing its performance data and machine learning research, giving it one of the deepest publication libraries of any company we’ve ever covered.
  • On top of that, Abridge has been racking up a lengthy list of deployments at health systems such as UPMC, Emory Healthcare, and University of Kansas Health System.

The competition is fierce in the AI scribe arena, which is packed with hungry startups like Suki and Nabla, as well as a thousand-pound gorilla named Nuance Communications. 

  • Half a million doctors use Nuance’s DAX dictation software, with “thousands” more already up-and-running on its new fully-automated DAX Copilot.

Some key differentiators give Abridge and its user base of 5,000 clinicians a solid shot at closing the distance, including “linkages” that map everything in the note to its source in both the transcript and audio (Nuance provides the transcript but not the recording). 

  • Abridge also developed its own ASR stack (automatic speech recognition), enabling it to do things like account for new medication names and excel at multilingual documentation, meaning it can generate an English note from a Spanish conversation.

The Takeaway

Abridge is emerging as a standout in the clinical documentation race, with DNA that’s as healthcare-native as it is AI-native. The executive team is lined with practicing physicians and machine learning experts, giving Abridge an advantageous understanding of not only the technology, but also the hurdles it will take for that technology to take hold in healthcare.

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