How Abridge Became a Top Healthcare AI Startup

Abridge, a Pittsburgh-based company established before the widespread recognition of OpenAI and LLMs, is consistently mentioned as a top AI startup by health-focused VCs

Shiv Rao, a practicing cardiologist, presented a startup concept to Andy Weissman, the general partner at Union Square Ventures, in 2019. Rao referred to it as “SoundCloud plus RapGenius for medicine.”

Although Weissman found the comparison between a developing AI-powered medical note-taking app and music hosting and lyrics transcription somewhat amusing, the concept resonated with him.

Rao elucidated that physicians typically spend up to two hours per day, outside of their regular work hours, composing notes summarizing their conversations with their patients.

For years, physicians have been experiencing exhaustion due to these administrative responsibilities, which has resulted in some individuals resigning from their profession.

Rao persuaded Weissman that the most recent advancements in AI could significantly reduce the time physicians spend managing the ever-expanding documentation burden.

This occurred several years before the global phenomenon of generative AI and its subsequent conquest of the imagination of venture capitalists.

“It was an extremely eccentric concept.” “No one had ever done it before,” Weissman stated.

However, Weissman and other USV partners appreciated that Rao was a physician at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and also spent half of his time as a corporate venture capitalist for the health system, investing in health tech entrepreneurs.

Rao’s advisers and employees were also graduates and professors at Carnegie Mellon, a prestigious United States institution specializing in AI and engineering research.

“[Shiv] possessed a unique blend of abilities: he was an entrepreneur with a highly ambitious vision and a truly captivating team,” Weissman stated. “It was distinctive.”

Abridge also offered a fundamental transcription product that physicians could obtain for free on their smartphones and utilize during patient interactions. Abridge’s LLM was founded on its utilization.

Abridge, a startup founded by Rao, has emerged as one of the industry’s most prominent and rapidly expanding AI-powered healthcare businesses just over five years after USV led a $5 million seed round.

Even though most corporations are hesitant to implement AI tools, major medical systems are anxious to establish contracts with Abridge.

Rao stated that the sales cycle for [health systems] can range from 18 to 24 months. “We were aware of the challenges we would face when we established the company.”

However, hospitals are purchasing Abridge at an accelerated rate, a stark contrast to their typical protracted purchasing behavior, due to a four-year lead on a virtual scribe product that has been taught in thousands of doctor-patient conversations and the current boom in AI.

Since the commencement of 2024, the organization has disclosed a new health system client almost weekly.

“We had amassed an immense amount of potential energy that was transformed into kinetic energy almost immediately in January,” Rao stated. “The list is endless,” he said, citing the University of Chicago, Sutter, Yale, Lee Health, Christus, Emory.”

Large hospitals are not only purchasing licenses for Abridge that include multiple thousand seats, but they are also publishing positive evaluations about the impact of the health tech’s software on the lives of physicians.

Abridge is being characterized as “magical,” “life-changing,” and “one of the most significant paradigm shifts in our careers” by hospital executives and physicians.

One of the most significant criticisms of generative AI is that it still has few significant commercial applications. However, the novel technology is a valuable application in virtual medical note-taking.

Overwhelmed by documentation

Rao stated, “I have professional PTSD and war stories about seeing patients and then having to spend hours and hours at night writing notes and doing all this clerical work that distracts from the thing that matters most, which is your patient, but also takes away from your own life.”

A physician can concentrate solely on the patient without the concern of completing specific sections in the medical record during the visit when the Abridge recording is playing in the background.

According to Dr. Lee Schwamm, Yale New Haven Medical System’s chief digital health officer and an Abridge customer, the payoff of AI-powered medical scribes is exceptionally straightforward to quantify.

This is why numerous health systems are utilizing them, with Abridge being particularly popular. “It is currently one of the most popular products in the AI sector,” he stated to TechCrunch.

As is the case with numerous administrative tasks in the health technology sector, the most critical factors in selecting a vendor are price and integration with Epic, an EHR utilized by the majority of large health systems in the United States, according to Schwamm.

Schwamm stated that Abridge is frequently the victorious option when health systems conduct head-to-head comparisons with other AI-powered medical scribes, as it supports 14 foreign languages, including Haitian Creole, Brazilian Portuguese, and Punjabi.

Abridge was granted the opportunity to be integrated into Epic earlier this year. Rao stated that when a doctor terminates a recording session recorded by Abridge, a note in English is stored in Epic and is awaiting prompt verification, editing, and adjustment.

Although Abridge appears to be ahead of its competitors, which include Ambiance, Nabla, and Suki, in addition to Microsoft-owned Nuance, Schwamm is still determining whether it will sustain its lead in the long term.

He asked, “Do you require a specialized medical LLM to succeed in this field?” “Or will the massive foundation models, including GPT-4o, Google, and Meta, become so advanced that they could digest an entire corpus of medical notes and begin to produce comparable performance?”

This line of inquiry demonstrates that most generative AI companies and virtual medical note-keeping are still in the early stages. The tempo of innovation is brisk and furious, and the current leaders may quickly lose their competitive advantage.

Schwamm stated, “Abridge is currently leading by a length; however, it is still early in the race. A horse may experience a knee injury and fall or continue to gain ground.”

Presently, most investors TechCrunch interviewed individuals who concurred that Abridge is among the leaders in the AI-powered medical scribe competition. Consequently, the organization has experienced an influx of capital.

Abridge raised a $150 million Series C in February, with Lightspeed Ventures leading the investment at a valuation of $850 million.