Abridge Raises $300 Million for AI Medical Note-Taking Tech

Medical-focused artificial intelligence (AI) startup Abridge has reportedly raised $300 million.

The funding values Abridge at $5.3 billion and will help the company develop its tool that uses AI to automate doctors’ note-taking, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Tuesday (June 24).

Abridge Co-founder and CEO Dr. Shiv Rao told the WSJ that the new capital will help the company hire scientists, machine-learning experts and software developers focused on building products and advanced AI infrastructure to support large customers.

The WSJ notes that this funding is happening at a time when what’s known as “ambient listening” technology, which tunes in to the conversations between doctor and patient and then transcribes them, is becoming more popular with hospitals and health systems.

This tech, the report adds, has been praised for alleviating burnout among doctors, letting them devote more time to their patients and less time having to transcribe their notes after hours.

The company’s technology is now used in over 150 large health systems around the country and will support more than 50 million medical conversations this year, the report added. It’s a big leap from a few years ago when the firm was piloting its technology with a handful of hospitals, said Rao.

“Since then, we’ve seen healthcare take up generative AI-centered solutions faster than any other industry,” he said.

In other news from the intersection of AI and healthcare, PYMNTS recently explored the promise the technology could hold in clinical research through the use of digital twins.

“Drug development has traditionally been an industry defined by high costs, slow timelines and steep failure rates,” that report said. “Today, that reality is changing. With an explosion of interest in generative AI and computational medicine, digital twins are no longer theoretical.”

It’s a tool being increasingly employed by pharmaceutical sponsors to streamline trials, particularly in high-need areas like neuroscience, due to their potential to shorten trial durations, lessen the reliance on placebo groups and get life-saving drugs to market faster.

“We’re not just tweaking the system,” Jon Walsh, founder and chief scientific officer at Unlearn, said during a discussion hosted by PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster. “We’re re-architecting it.”

Digital twin technology, Walsh argued, can help level the healthcare playing field.

“Not all doctors have access to all of the tools and not all doctors have the same capabilities,” Webster noted during the conversation.

“This is as much a technical problem as it is a social one,” Walsh said. “Better infrastructure, better use of medical records, better education for doctors. It’s very dangerous to build tools that doctors can’t understand and can’t trust.”