As Abridge quickly scales across U.S. health systems, this new investment will fuel foundational research and bolder bets on the future of AI in healthcare.
Abridge, the leader in generative AI for clinical documentation, announced an additional $150 million investment, leveraging momentum from their product’s rapid uptake among health systems throughout the nation. This raise comes just 4 months after their $30M Series B, and is one of the largest funding rounds made to date in generative AI for healthcare.
The Series C investment was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, who will also join the board. 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 also announced a new enterprise agreement with the Yale New Haven Health System, the largest and most comprehensive healthcare system in Connecticut, that will give thousands of clinicians access to Abridge for clinical documentation. Yale New Haven Health has selected Abridge as their generative AI partner in this area of ambient listening. The 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.
“Freeing doctors from the burden of documentation will dramatically improve both quality of care and the doctor-patient relationship,” said Paul Ricci, Advisor, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and former Chairman and CEO of Nuance Communications. “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.”
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“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,” said Sebastian Duesterhoeft, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “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.”
Abridge has been assembling a world-class AI team for years and these investments are rapidly hitting production. In the last year alone, they delivered an industry-leading automatic speech recognition engine purpose-built for healthcare applications. Their speech and language technologies have been rigorously evaluated in 14 languages and functionally support many more—performing well even amidst rapid switches between languages and when interpreters are in the room. Abridge is ahead of the market in controlling its full technology pipeline, developing its own purpose-built LLMs. Moreover, its “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 thus to the underlying audio) has become a required capability. The company is actively developing novel ways to personalize notes, integrate more deeply into the EMR, and provide clinicians with after-visit insights.
With this new capital, Abridge will continue to push boldly into fundamental research, developing bedrock foundation models that draw upon vast troves of multimodal healthcare data. These models will both power improvements to Abridge’s existing product lines and enable a new wave of possibilities in the future.
“We are grateful to be partnering with iconic institutions that share our dedication to improving the lives of patients and clinicians,” said Dr. Shiv Rao, CEO and Founder of Abridge. “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.”
SOURCE: BusinessWire
