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Ambience Healthcare Joins Unicorn Club With Series C
August 4, 2025
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Together with
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“If it’s not iPhone-easy, then it won’t be used – and adoption drives everything else.”
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Ambience Healthcare Co-Founder Nikhil Buduma
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Another week, another ambient AI mega-round – this time from none other than Ambience Healthcare and its massive $293M Series C.
Welcome to the unicorn club. The round vaulted Ambience’s valuation to $1.25B, making it the second-highest valued startup in the ambient arena behind Abridge, which was valued at an eye-popping $5.3B during its recent $300M Series E.
- Funnily enough, a16z led both rounds. We don’t usually see VCs cut a check for a startup then turn around and fund their biggest competitor, but playing both sides is a great way to not lose a race.
Ambience isn’t just a scribe. It’s an ambient AI platform for documentation, coding, and clinical documentation integrity.
- The platform was “architected with the understanding that health systems are not monolithic enterprises” and adapts to the unique context of different care settings.
If you ain’t first, you’re last. Ambience was one of the only ambient AI players to lean in on the revenue cycle component right out of the gate, and the head start is reflected in the results from head-to-head pilots.
- During a six month bake-off at Cleveland Clinic (now a happy customer), Ambience saw 80% clinician utilization and an NPS of 60, both the highest by a wide margin.
- Ambience Co-Founder Nikhil Buduma told us that the secret sauce is the platform’s ability to make clinicians feel like “it’s almost reading their minds,” which is made possible by continuous fine-tuning the model for individual specialties.
Where do we go from here? If the launch of Doximity’s free scribe taught us anything, it’s that documentation is officially a commodity. Ambience’s new funds will help it do everything else.
- That includes diving deeper into the revenue cycle and clinical trials, as well as moving upstream into taking care of patients outside of the four walls of the clinic.
- It also includes scaling up operations, and Ambience has already begun hiring dozens of former startup founders to lead its new verticals.
The Takeaway
We’re now in a world where perfect transcripts are table stakes, which means the winners of the ambient AI race will be the companies that can help carry the tasks happening after the clinical conversation. Ambience just bulked up to do some heavy lifting.
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Navina AI “May Be Essential for Thriving” in VBC
Innovation lab Phyx Primary was left with one conclusion after its independent evaluation of Navina’s AI Copilot: AI “may be essential for thriving” in value-based care. Physicians using Navina saw a 40% reduction in clinical review time, a 32% decrease in burnout, and lifted STAR quality ratings by 1.9 points. The experience scores were just the icing on the cake. Get the full report to learn more.
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Ambient AI – From Helicopter to Hospital
In emergency medicine, ambient AI solutions like Playback Pro have become a lifeline for both doctors and patients, allowing them to record and share important information amidst all the chaos. Tune in to this webinar recording to hear North Shore University Hospital and air medical transport provider Life Link III share how ambient AI is supporting clinicians in the highest-pressure environments.
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- Innovaccer Unveils Comet: Innovaccer kept up its weekly cadence of shipping new solutions with the launch of Comet, an AI-powered Access Center solution designed to turn traditional call centers into always-on digital front doors. “Like its namesake, Comet moves fast,” integrating omnichannel AI agents with bidirectional EHR connectivity to streamline scheduling, process referrals, and perform eligibility checks. The included AI Copilots for Live Agents provide real-time guidance and next best actions that reportedly reduce average call handle time by up to 38%.
- Docs Wave Goodbye to Medicare: New research in JAMA Health Forum showed that physicians continue to exit traditional Medicare – a trend that’s only been accelerating since the start of the pandemic. The study found that the main drivers are administrative burdens, declining reimbursement, and practice consolidation. No surprises there. Primary care physicians are leading the march to the exit (4.41% dropped Medicare in 2023), followed by hospital-based specialists (3.50%) and surgical specialists (2.99%).
- Teladoc Beats Expectations for Q2: Teladoc beat Wall Street expectations for Q2 as it continues executing on its strategy overhaul. Revenue for the second quarter came in at $632M (down 2% from last year), while its net loss shrank to $33M (down from $838M, which was due to a hefty impairment charge courtesy of BetterHelp). The BetterHelp mental health segment continued to struggle in the wake of Teladoc acquiring virtual therapy provider UpLift in June, with revenue falling 9% to $240M. We’ll have to wait until next quarter to see if adding in-network therapy options helped turn things around.
- C8 Series A: C8 Health landed $12M of Series A funding to solve one of healthcare’s most persistent problems: care inconsistency. The “AI-powered best practices implementation platform” helps provider orgs store clinical protocols, then delivers contextual guidance to clinicians within their existing EHR workflows. C8 is reportedly seeing impressive 90% clinician adoption rates within six months of deployment at customers like Dartmouth Health and Metro Health.
- ChristianaCare + NeuroFlow: ChristianaCare and NeuroFlow teamed up to tackle maternal mental health. The Delaware-based system will be leveraging NeuroFlow’s platform to scale mental health screenings for its pregnant and postpartum patients across all of its hospitals and 15 OB‑GYN clinics. The goal is to help stratify risks and address them with appropriate clinical resources or NeuroFlow’s personalized educational content.
- RPM Works for Hypertension Control: JACC: Advances published a large study on over 23k Cadence users with hypertension, which found that the startup’s remote patient monitoring services led to significant improvements in blood pressure control. By leveraging Cadence’s smart BP cuff and tech-enabled protocols, clinicians were able to drive a 14/8 mm Hg average reduction in BP over 30 weeks. That represents a 70% relative increase in the number of patients that hit goal BP at follow-up.
- Rural Hospitals Lag on AI: The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis put out a great analysis of the AI adoption struggles at rural hospitals. Nearly half of hospitals (43.9%) in metro counties reported using AI, with a lower share indicating use in “metro-adjacent counties” (28.1%) and an even smaller share in “not-metro-adjacent counties” (17.7%). The pattern was consistent across AI use cases like optimizing admin tasks or predicting patient demand, which means the rural systems with the most need for AI have yet to realize its benefits due to lacking the resources to implement it.
- Hospitals Margins Take Hit in May: Kaufman Hall’s latest Flash Report showed that May was the weakest month of the year for hospital operating margins, coming in at just 2.2% after continuing to fall from the January high of 3.8%. Margin pressures and dwindling volumes haven’t been letting up, prompting the biggest month-over-month drop in outpatient revenue that we’ve seen in 2025. Drug expenses also showed a notable increase, which the report pinned on an aging population and higher utilization of specialty pharmaceuticals.
- Kontakt Hits the Pavement: Kontakt.io is bringing its real-time location services for hospitals where few similar solutions have gone before: outside of hospitals. The RTLS company’s Staff Safe workplace violence prevention solution now includes full outdoor coverage – including parking lots, garages, drop-off zones, and walking paths. The move enables hospitals to provide comprehensive staff protection beyond the indoors and throughout their campuses with a single platform.
- Can AI For Whole-Body Scans Predict Disease? New research in npj Digital Medicine suggests that the answer depends on the disease. German researchers developed AI algorithms to analyze whole-body MRI scans of healthy people acquired as part of the UK Biobank study. The combination of AI MRI and non-image data fell short for cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, and osteoarthritis (accuracy = 0.55-0.64), but performed better for COPD and pancreatic disease (0.74-0.75).
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Elevate 2025: Medallion’s Virtual Conference Returns September 17
Now in its fourth year, Medallion’s annual conference is back – bringing together healthcare leaders to explore this year’s theme: Elevate the present. Reframe the future of healthcare. Hear from industry voices like Tom Lawry, author of Hacking Healthcare, UPMC Chief Medical Information Officer Robert Bart, and many more. Reserve your spot now.
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Next Generation Ambient Tech and Agents
The ambient AI transformation is already sweeping across health systems, reducing administrative burdens and improving patient outcomes. So, what’s next? Tune into this on-demand session to learn how systems like Carle Health and Denver Health are leveraging Nabla to eliminate Pajama Time and build a future where agentic AI unlocks true workforce sustainability.
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- Withings and Babyscripts Team Up on Maternal Health: Babyscripts is teaming up with Withings Health Solutions to tackle the leading cause of maternal mortality in the U.S. – hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, including preeclampsia. Learn how remote patient monitoring with BPM Pro 2 is helping Baybscripts keep mothers safe through personalized support when they need it most.
- How Do You Know Your Ambient AI Is Working? Not all ambient AI is created equal. That’s why Abridge developed a scientifically validated approach to evaluating ambient AI efficacy for clinicians, which is used by a majority of its 150+ enterprise partners to make crucial decisions around adoption and scale. The Abridge Clinician Survey has also been leveraged in numerous peer-reviewed research studies and will be featured in several upcoming publications. Learn more.
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