Abridge, a leader in ambient clinical documentation, is on track to support over 50 million clinical conversations by year’s end, and it just raised six times that number in dollars to do even more.
On June 24, the company announced it closed its $300 million Series E funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz and joined by Khosla Ventures. The raise is not just large, but telling. It signals investor confidence in category leadership, and it suggests the generative AI company is ready to move beyond product and into platform. Or, in Abridge’s words, a new “paradigm.”
Abridge Founder and CEO Shiv Rao, MD, sees this moment as a line break, with the company moving forward from here as a multi-product platform partner with capabilities for clinicians, nurses and health systems’ revenue cycles.
“I think [the raise] also reflects how big the opportunity is, how much impact we can create over time as we evolve into this platform,” Dr. Rao says. “Our thesis all along has been that healthcare is about people, and that’s not going to change. We’re not going to fully automate doctors or nurses. And as such, these conversations, these dialogues that professionals have with their patients — they’re upstream of so many workflows in healthcare.”
In addition to serving as CEO of Abridge, Dr. Rao still practices medicine as a cardiologist. He’s on call one day a week and works one weekend per month. That time seems to carry even deeper significance since he founded Abridge in 2018. Today, with the company standing at a $5.3 billion valuation, more than 90% of clinicians who start using Abridge continue to do so in a meaningful way, with 60% to 70% reporting reduced burnout.
“One of the key insights for us all along has been that from the conversation, you can create so much impact,” Dr. Rao says.
‘The harder challenges are the more gratifying ones’
Coinciding with its Series E funding, the company announced it has partnered with more than 150 health systems, up from the 100 partners it announced at the start of 2025.
Partners include academic medicine giants (Johns Hopkins Medicine, Duke Health, UNC Health, UChicago Medicine), specialty leaders (Mayo Clinic, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center), safety-net providers (AltaMed Health Services) and children’s hospitals (Akron Children’s, Seattle Children’s).
Abridge is broadening not just who it partners with, but who its platform serves. Since last summer, the company has been collaborating with Mayo Clinic and Epic on documentation technology designed specifically for nurses. The team has been working to take everyday conversations nurses have with patients and translate them to structured flowsheet entries sans commands, dictation or prompts.
The company also took a major step this summer by expanding into the inpatient setting with Abridge Inside for Inpatient. The move holds strategic weight for the company and personal significance for Dr. Rao, who treats all of his patients in the inpatient setting.
Ambient AI for inpatient is more challenging, in some ways. Clinician-patient and nurse-patient interactions in the inpatient setting are numerous, complex, sometimes chaotic: tests come back, consults are ordered, medications are adjusted, treatments are decided — all spread out over larger spans of time. These touchpoints add up to a different style and structure of note with high stakes.
“The goal is to not just check the box from a clinical communications perspective, but from a compliance perspective, because inpatient notes are really under the microscope from a billing perspective,” Dr. Rao notes. Instrumental to this is Abridge’s Contextual Reasoning Engine, which is designed with clinical, payer, and revenue cycle data to generate documentation that is both clinically meaningful and billing-compliant.
“Abridge Inside automatically transforms bedside conversations into structured Epic notes, empowering inpatient clinicians who deliver the intricately balanced coordinated care for admitted patients to devote more time to patient care,” said Veena Jones, MD, vice president and CMIO at Sutter Health. “Seamless Epic integration into a variety of note types makes it easy to use, and our admitting hospitalists, in particular, are thrilled.”
Also in June, Abridge rolled out outpatient ordering capabilities, a feature Dr. Rao says many physicians had been wanting since they began using the core notes product. It was developed through Workshop, a collaboration between Epic and Abridge to co-develop and pilot healthcare technologies before broader release.
Outpatient ordering is a feature easier said than done. Consider the pronunciation of oral oncolytics like Imatinib, Palbociclib and Osimertinib. None exactly roll off the tongue or even resemble actual words. The language itself demands exceptional precision from Abridge’s science and speech models, with accuracy for a vast clinical vocabulary of therapeutics, pharmaceuticals, diagnostics and more across 55 specialties and 28 languages.
From product to platform
Abridge appears to be doubling down. The company reorganized its website on the heels of its Series E news, adjusting “product” to “platform” — a change that is rooted in more than linguistics. Dr. Rao said it is focused on the layers of value that unlock when clinical conversations become more than notes and start working like infrastructure. And despite nearly doubling its valuation since February, the company still seems to operate with the urgency and edge of a younger startup, eager to prove its tenacity.
“[Abridge has] truly rare ingredients: world-class clinical and technical leadership, deep scientific credibility, and AI technology that is years ahead of the field,” David George, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said. He emphasized both its “vision and velocity to create lasting, systemic change.”
The wins and such votes of confidence have reinforced Abridge’s playbook: shift left, pursue depth, stay rigorous, and keep building toward an end-to-end platform designed to make healthcare better. Line by line. Conversation by conversation.
“The harder challenges are the more gratifying ones,” Dr. Rao notes. “I am bullish — all of us are bullish — that we have the team to hit it out of the park.”
