Abridge – a leader in generative AI for clinical documentation – announced an additional $150 million investment, utilizing momentum from their product’s rapid uptake among health systems nationwide. This funding round comes just fourth months after their $30 million Series B, and is one of the largest funding rounds made to date in generative AI for healthcare.
The Series C funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, who will also join the board. And other new and existing investors continuing to support the company include co-lead Redpoint Ventures, with support from IVP, Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Wittington Ventures, Mass General Brigham Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Fund (AIDIF), Kaiser Permanente Ventures, and CVS Health Ventures.
Abridge has also announced a new enterprise agreement with the Yale New Haven Health System, the largest and most comprehensive healthcare system in Connecticut, which will give thousands of clinicians access to Abridge for clinical documentation. And Yale New Haven Health has selected Abridge as their generative AI partner in this area of ambient listening. This initial deployment will be focused on reducing the cognitive burden of clinical documentation, enabling clinicians to spend more face-to-face time engaging with patients instead of computers.
Abridge has been assembling a world-class AI team for several years and these investments are rapidly hitting production. And in the last year alone, they delivered an industry-leading automatic speech recognition engine purpose-built for healthcare applications. The company’s speech and language technologies have been rigorously evaluated and tested in 14 languages and it functionally supports many more – performing well even with rapid switches between languages and when interpreters are in the room. And the company’s Linked Evidence feature – a first-of-its-kind technology that maps any highlighted region within a summary to the substantiating evidence in the source transcript and to the underlying audio has become a required capability. The company is also actively developing novel ways to personalize notes, integrate more deeply into the EMR, and provide clinicians with after-visit insights.
With this new funding round, Abridge will continue to push boldly into fundamental research, developing bedrock foundation models that draw upon vast troves of multimodal healthcare data. And these models will both power improvements to Abridge’s existing product lines and enable a new wave of possibilities in the future.
KEY QUOTES:
“Freeing doctors from the burden of documentation will dramatically improve both quality of care and the doctor-patient relationship. Abridge will allow caregivers to capture an enormous amount of data that is currently being discarded or ignored, and that in turn will likely lead to new insights in managing population health. I’m thrilled to work with Dr. Rao and his team on the next great step in the evolution of healthcare.”
– Paul Ricci, Advisor, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and former Chairman and CEO of Nuance Communications
“Abridge has set new standards for quality and responsible deployment of generative AI in health systems across the U.S., cementing it as the industry’s most trusted AI platform. Abridge stands out for their innovation in all facets of product development. CTO Zack Lipton, a widely cited Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon and pioneer in responsible AI research, has assembled the strongest research team in healthcare AI. They have set new expectations for transparency and verification with their evidence extraction technology, and raised the bar for both note quality and evaluation methodology.”
– Sebastian Duesterhoeft, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners
“We are grateful to be partnering with iconic institutions that share our dedication to improving the lives of patients and clinicians. This company was founded on the premise that clinician-patient conversations are at the core of all healthcare. Already, this information is powering a revolution in AI-based documentation. In the future, it will open new pathways to improve patient outcomes. Realizing this vision requires world-class talent and formidable compute resources. We are now uniquely positioned to build the AI platform that brings this vision to life.”
– Dr. Shiv Rao, CEO and Founder of Abridge
