We’re thrilled to announce that Redpoint is co-leading Abridge’s $150M Series C. Abridge is the leading generative AI company for clinical documentation.
Healthtech is a difficult space. There remains a large gap between the health system we want and what we have. Companies often face trade-offs between full impact and viable business models. Sales cycles are long. It’s often not clear just how helpful some technology really is.
The dream is to find the companies that break through this. The companies that marry a venture-scale go-to-market model with real system impact; that build groundbreaking technology that dramatically helps patients and clinicians. The companies that actually change healthcare. Anyone who’s been in health tech long enough knows just how rare it is you find something that feels like that.
Abridge is one of those companies and we couldn’t be more excited that Redpoint is co-leading Abridge’s $150M Series C.
The Problem
The initial problems Abridge solves are viscerally clear for anyone who has a clinician friend doing hours of late night notes in their “pajama time.” Clinicians spend two hours on paperwork for every one hour of direct care. This is the top cause of physician burnout. Over 60% of physicians report symptoms of burnout, a dramatic increase that threatens patient care and health system functionality. This is a hair on fire problem. Ask any health system executive what their top focus is today and they will say their workforce. The avalanche of documentation harms patients too who don’t get a clinician’s full attention and may struggle to remember what was said in a visit.
Enter Abridge
Abridge solves this. Their product seamlessly records visits, structures notes and makes it easy to drop them in the right place in Electronic Health Records. No typing during visits or after hours work required. And patients can get follow ups tailored to their level of understanding.
Abridge has a fantastic set of customers (including UPMC, Kansas, Emory and Yale). The feedback from clinicians, patients and health system leaders is truly incredible; watch the video of Emory’s experience with Abridge here. It’s deeply inspiring to see technology having such a tangible impact in healthcare.
Abridge is spreading rapidly and the market opportunity here is enormous. But this is just the beginning. As Abridge Founder and CEO Dr. Shiv Rao likes to say: everything flows from the doctor-patient conversation. This includes what the right next steps for a patient are, how their visit should be billed, what trials they might want to enroll in etc. The possibilities of being able to surface information in real-time, based on what happened during a visit to a doctor while a patient is in the room, are endless. Generative AI enables a whole new world of clinical impact and massive markets and Abridge is well-positioned to be the defining company in the category.
Building The Generative AI Healthcare Company
This position is in large part due to Abridge’s team. As we’ve spent more time in AI applications, the power of combining deep AI expertise with deep industry knowledge has become clear. AI experts can build domain-specific models that are more performant and use application data to train smaller models that are cheaper and faster. Industry experts understand how to perfectly embed the power of these models into daily workflows.
Abridge is a poster child for this kind of company. Their tech team is led by Zack Lipton, a widely cited Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon and pioneer in responsible AI research. Their strong research team has built their own speech recognition model and customizable note styles while tailoring the product to work in 14+ languages and 50+ specialties. Abridge’s Linked Evidence features, where every sentence in a note can be traced directly back to a specific part of the conversation, enables all stakeholders to trust generative AI outputs. Abridge’s deep integration with Epic ensures all these features fit directly into clinicians’ workflows.
Abridge is poised to change healthcare. They can help doctors make better decisions and rediscover their joy of practice, improve how everyone in the system understands how to best help patients, and empower patients to understand and take charge of their care. We couldn’t be more excited about what this deeply mission-driven team will continue to build to transform healthcare.
We’re thrilled to be partnering with Shiv, Zack, Julia, Tina, Brian, Dan and the entire Abridge team. We’re also excited to join our friends at Lightspeed, Spark, Bessemer, USV, Wittington, IVP and CVS Health Ventures on this journey.
If you’re equally excited about the way Abridge is transforming healthcare, take a look at their open roles here.