Ask health-focused VCs to name one of the best AI startups, and the name Pittsburgh-based Abridge keeps coming up. And it's a startup that started before OpenAI became famous and LLM entered common parlance in the Valley.
In 2019, Shiv Rao, a practicing cardiologist, proposed a startup idea to Andy Weissman, general partner at Union Square Ventures. Rao called it SoundCloud and RapGenius for medicine.
Weissman thought it was a bit humorous to compare early AI-based medical note-taking apps to music hosting and lyric transcription, but the concept resonated with him.
Rao explained that doctors spend up to two hours a day (usually outside of regular work hours) typing notes summarizing what they discussed with patients that day. This administrative work has led to physician burnout over the years, leading some to quit the profession altogether. Rao convinced Weissman that the latest innovations in AI could dramatically reduce the time doctors spend on their growing burden of paperwork.
It was a few years before generative AI took the world by storm and captured the imagination of VCs.
“It was a very crazy idea. No one had ever done it before,” Weissman said.
But Weissman and other USV partners liked that Rao was not only a physician at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, but also spent half his time as a corporate venture capitalist for that health system, investing in health technology startups. Rao's staff and advisors were also alumni and professors at Carnegie Mellon, one of the nation's leading institutions for engineering and AI research.
“[Shiv] He had a rare combination of talent: an entrepreneur with a very ambitious vision and a really exciting team,” Weissman said. “It was a unique feeling.”
Abridge also had a basic transcription product that doctors could download for free on their smartphones and use while interacting with patients. Their use formed the basis of the Abridge LLM.
A little more than five years after USV led a $5 million seed round for Rao's startup Abridge, the company has become one of the most talked-about and fastest-growing AI-based healthcare businesses.
While most companies are still very cautious about adopting AI tools, large health systems are eager to sign deals with Abridge.
“The sales cycle is [health systems] It could be 18 to 24 months,” Rao said. “When we started the company, we knew what we were doing.” But with a four-year lead on virtual scribe products trained on thousands of doctor-patient conversations, and now AI booming, hospitals are suddenly buying Abridge at a rapid pace. This is in stark contrast to typically long-lasting purchasing behavior. The company has been announcing new health system customers almost every week since early 2024.
“We accumulated all this potential energy that turned into kinetic energy almost overnight in January,” Rao said. “The University of Chicago, Sutter University, Yale University, Lee Health University, Christus University, Emory University, the list goes on,” he said.
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Not only are large hospitals purchasing licenses for thousands of seats from Abridge, but many are posting glowing reviews about how the medtech software is changing doctors' lives. Hospital executives and physicians describe Abridge as “life-changing,” “magical,” and “one of the most significant paradigm shifts of our careers.”
One of the biggest criticisms of generative AI is that it still has few practical business applications. However, creating virtual medical records appears to be a valuable application of the new technology.
get caught up in paperwork
“I have professional PTSD and war stories of having to write notes and do clerical work for hours at night after seeing patients. “It not only gets in the way of what’s most important: seeing your patients, but also your personal life.” Rao said.
With Abridge records in the background, doctors can focus entirely on their patients without having to worry about completing specific fields in their medical records during the visit.
Dr. Lee Schwamm, chief digital health officer at Abridge customer Yale New Haven Medical System, says it's very easy to measure the return on investment for an AI-powered medical scribe. That's why so many health systems, especially Abridge, are flocking to use it. . “It’s one of the hottest products in AI right now,” he told TechCrunch.
As with many administrative tasks in the health technology field, Schwamm said the most important considerations when choosing a vendor are price and integration with Epic, the EHR used by most large health systems in the United States. Abridge, which supports 14 foreign languages, including Haitian Creole, Brazilian Portuguese and Punjabi, is often the winner when health systems compare directly to other AI-based medical scribes, Schwamm said.
Earlier this year, Abridge won the rights to integrate inside Epic. After Abridge recorded the session and the doctor stopped recording, Rao said, “We have notes in English inside Epic waiting for the doctor to quickly check, edit and adjust.”
While Abridge appears to be ahead of competitors including Ambiance, Nabla and Suki in addition to Microsoft-owned Nuance, Schwamm is not sure it can maintain its lead in the long term.
“The biggest question is: Do I need a dedicated healthcare LLM to succeed in this field?” he asked. “Or will the giant underlying models, GPT-4o, Google, and Meta, improve to the point where they can provide similar performance by ingesting entire medical records?”
These findings show that it is still early days for most generative AI companies, not just virtual medical note taking. The pace of innovation is fast and furious, and today’s winners can easily lose their edge.
“Abridge is way ahead, but it’s early in the race,” Schwamm said. “A horse may have a bad knee and fall, or he may continue to go further.”
Currently, most investors TechCrunch agrees are that Abridge is leading the race for AI-based medical scribes. Because of this, money poured into the company.
Last February, Abridge raised a $150 million Series C investment led by Lightspeed Ventures at a valuation of $850 million.