Major investments in AI firms have become a staple of the news cycle in 2025. But while many tech companies have secured millions of dollars, few valuations are backed up by as many tangible success stories as those cultivated by leading healthcare ambient AI companies.
On July 29, Ambience announced a Series C funding round of $243 million, bringing its valuation to $1.25 billion. Oak HC/FT and Andreessen Horowitz led the round, which will be used to scale Ambience’s AI platform for real-time clinical documentation and coding. With this fresh round of capital, the ambient AI leader aims to transform clinical and administrative workflows — major weaknesses for most health systems — into strategic strengths.
The company’s future plans include an AI companion to support patients on their care journeys and more sophisticated specialty care documentation to bolster revenue cycle performance.
The latest investment is indicative of Ambience’s success to date. With a client roster that includes some of the most lauded health systems in the nation — Cleveland Clinic, Houston Methodist and Memorial Hermann, among others — Ambience has inspired a market response of “genuine customer love,” according to Vig Chandramouli, partner at Oak HC/FT.
“Ambience has developed a comprehensive AI platform that not only works across specialties and integrates seamlessly with EHR systems, but also meets the rigorous standards of compliance teams — a rare and powerful combination,” Mr. Chandramouli said.
According to Ambience’s cofounders, the funding will help the company bring “radical change” to an industry with a reputation for lagging on innovation.
Human-centric innovation
Ambience currently supports more than 100 ambulatory subspecialties, emergency departments and inpatient specialties. While deep tech savvy and entrepreneurial drive may be the engine powering Ambience forward, the company’s foundation is grounded in the human experience of healthcare. During a call with Becker’s Hospital Review, Ambience’s two cofounders both described their personal connections to healthcare as being among the catalysts for the company’s launch.
For Mr. Ng, it was watching his partner — a physician — wrestle with burnout and spend Sunday evenings coding. This experience is exceedingly common in healthcare. Some studies suggest physicians spend nearly two hours outside of work each day on EHR tasks. This practice has an innocuous sounding moniker: “pajama time.” However, the phrase isn’t reflective of the insidious nature of the practice. Coding after hours can be a tremendous burden for physicians with little time to spare. It pulls them away from family and friends and (in some cases) drives them out of the profession altogether.
This is where AI firms like Ambience have already made significant progress. At Cleveland Clinic, physicians are getting time back in their days and more face time with clinicians.
“All the providers who have tried the product have given me nothing short of glowing reviews and feedback, and they can’t wait to get their hands on it,” Rohit Chandra, PhD, executive vice president and chief digital officer of Cleveland Clinic, previously told Becker’s.
For Ambience Cofounder and Chief Scientist Nikhil Buduma, it was a childhood characterized by a cardiac condition that required frequent hospital visits where his parents were forced to navigate the complexity of health insurance and the logistics of specialty care.
The patient and physician experience are inextricably linked. A physician burdened by clicks and screen time is less likely to offer patients the personalized care they desire. Ambience has already made progress on this front by reducing the burden of physician documentation at the point of care. But the patient experience doesn’t end in the exam room, there is after care, follow-up exams, referrals and medication refills to consider. Ambience wants to go on that journey too.
“What we’re starting to do with a couple of our health system partners is experiment with the idea of what would it look like to go beyond creating a static document and advance into an interactive agent,” said Mr. Buduma, describing a scenario where an AI agent helps a patient navigate a primary care referral to oncology care with no clinical details “slipping through the cracks.”
“We think there’s going to be a radical change in the patient experience,” he said. “This might be the single greatest thing to happen to the consumer experience in healthcare.”
The end of ‘hand-to-hand combat’ in RCM
Clinical variation, regulatory requirements and fragmented data are just a few of the factors that make healthcare documentation so complex. This complexity increases as care becomes more specialized. As a result, many ambient AI solutions have not yet had the same meaningful impact on clinical documentation in specialty care as they have in primary care.
The Ambience platform, however, doesn’t treat documentation as a one-size-fits-all task. The technology is consistently being refined to understand both the clinical and billing intricacies of specialty care.
“You have to train models to not only understand the medicine of care delivery but to also understand the myriad of coding and billing rules that apply to that particular visit for a particular patient,” Mr. Ng said.
The complexity of billing requirements in both primary and specialty care has created a reactive revenue cycle where teams must address an endless stream of denials to ensure adequate reimbursement. As Ambience continues to improve the efficacy of its platforms, it aims to reduce reactive friction in RCM.
“In a world where you can create a better source of truth for the documentation of clinical care, then all of sudden RCM teams don’t need to do retroactive hand-to-hand combat,” Mr. Buduma said. “By bypassing much of how legacy RCM works today, we can create more fulfilling roles for revenue cycle teams.”
AI for clinicians, administrators and patients
Much of the early conversation about the benefits of ambient AI in healthcare has been, rightfully, focused on the benefits delivered to physicians. But healthcare, of course, isn’t just about physicians — it’s about behind the scenes teams and patients too. Ambience aims to make AI work for them.
“Documentation has long been a source of friction,” Mr. Ng said. “Ambience is turning it into a source of strength — transforming how clinicians deliver care, how administrators run operations and how patients experience the system.”
