Abridge, a generative artificial intelligence-driven clinical documentation company, announced late Thursday it had raised $150 million in Series C funding.
As one of the largest rounds in the past six months, the infusion of capital could cast a glimmer of hope on a digital health market insiders said was bound for a "reckoning" this year.
Read more: Mayo, Kaiser, CVS invest in generative AI company
Venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners led the all-equity round and will occupy one of the company’s board seats. Redpoint Ventures co-led the round and will not hold board seats.
According to Abridge Co-founder and CEO Dr. Shiv Rao, the company will use the capital to increase its research and development efforts, with the goal of further developing the software to use recordings from patient and clinician interactions to auto-populate additional areas of the electronic health record.
“From a structured data perspective, there are so many discrete fields inside existing systems that we can start to pre-populate,” Rao said. “That, in and of itself, is a huge effort that we're excited with this new capital investment to go after.”
Rao said the funding will also allow it to double its headcount to between 120 and 140 people. The company has offices in San Francisco, New York, Pittsburgh and Madison, Wisconsin.
The company declined to share its valuation following the round.
The clinical documentation space has been buzzing with interest since ChatGPT's public launch in November 2022. Abridge competitor Nuance, acquired by Microsoft in March 2022 for $19.7 billion, announced it was adding OpenAI’s ChatGPT successor GPT-4 to its product offerings in March 2023.
Both companies have signed on as participants in a recently announced program from Epic that gives a small group of vendors a co-developing relationship with the electronic health record giant.
Sebastian Duesterhoeft, partner at Lightspeed, said Abridge's integration capabilities with Epic contributed to the firm's interest.
“This deal doesn’t get done if Abridge doesn’t have an ability to work really closely with Epic and have an ability to integrate with Epic,” Duesterhoeft said.
“If I think about the order of operations, and if I think about what integrations I as an investor would value most highly, we all have to acknowledge that Epic is an incredibly important player in the ecosystem," he said.
Rao declined to elaborate on the financial terms of Abridge's co-development relationship with Epic.
Abridge last raised $30 million in an October 2023 Series B funding round, with total funding at $212.5 million.
Boston-based Mass General Brigham's Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Fund joined venture capital firms, including Bessemer Venture Partners and IVP, as participants in the round.
CVS Health Ventures, the venture capital firm Spark and the venture capital fund associated with Oakland, California-based Kaiser Permanente also joined the round, following their Series B investments last year.
