The U.S. healthcare system spends nearly $1.5 trillion each year on administrative overhead, and much of it is tied to clinical documentation. For physicians, that means hours spent each week turning patient conversations into billing-ready notes, navigating coding protocols, and responding to auditors often well after the visit ends.
“The last thing we should ask of doctors is to become experts in reimbursement,” said Dr. Shiv Rao, co-founder and CEO of Abridge. “We’ve built systems that go to coding school, risk adjustment school, utilization management school so doctors don’t have to.”
Abridge, the Pittsburgh- and San Francisco-based startup, has raised $300 million in Series E funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Khosla Ventures, bringing its total funding to nearly $800 million. The round comes just four months after Abridge raised $250 million in Series D financing and reportedly values the company at $5.3 billion.
Founded in 2018, Abridge develops ambient generative AI software that captures physician-patient conversations and automatically generates structured clinical documentation including ICD-10 codes, risk adjustment factors, and audit-ready evidence. The company says its platform now supports over 150 enterprise health systems, and will process more than 50 million medical conversations this year across 55 specialties and 28 languages.
What began as a documentation tool has evolved into a real-time clinical and billing assistant. Abridge’s technology now integrates with leading EHR systems like Epic and flags billing-relevant information as the encounter unfolds. This allows clinicians to meet payer-specific documentation requirements without needing follow-up from coders or queries from auditors.
A Mid-Revenue Cycle Company
“We are, in essence, a mid-revenue cycle company,” Rao told Fierce Healthcare. “The notes we generate essentially function as bills for insurance companies.”
The company’s Contextual Reasoning Engine supports the latest CMS-HCC risk adjustment models (including Version 28), and automatically surfaces hierarchical condition categories (HCCs), visit diagnoses, and MEAT criteria (Monitor, Evaluate, Assess, Treat) evidence all during the live clinical exchange.
This capability will reduce friction between frontline clinicians and revenue cycle teams, who typically enter the process only after documentation is complete. Abridge says its system eliminates the need for delayed coordination, reducing denials and accelerating reimbursement.
Enterprise-Scale Deployments
Adoption is growing quickly. Johns Hopkins Medicine is rolling out Abridge to 6,700 clinicians across six hospitals and 40 care centers. Mayo Clinic, which initially used Abridge for nursing workflows, is expanding the platform across its clinical organization. Inova Health System is scaling Abridge from 2,000 physicians to all 6,000 nurses, allowing them to document while walking through inpatient suites via voice interaction.
At Yale New Haven Health System, around 800 of 3,000 employed physicians currently use Abridge, with that number expected to double in the coming year. “It will become imperative for our physicians to use it, just like we require physicians to use the electronic health record,” said Dr. Lee Schwamm, SVP and chief digital health officer.
Abridge reports that over 90% of clinicians who start using its platform continue doing so, and internal feedback shows it can reduce documentation-related burnout by 60–70%.
Expanding Product Surface Area
The company has also extended its reach into inpatient settings, a workflow known for its complexity. It recently launched new functionality that integrates into Epic’s inpatient workflows, building on its outpatient and emergency medicine support.
In addition, Abridge introduced a generative AI tool for streamlining outpatient orders through Epic’s Workshop program, developed a medical record template tailored to pediatric primary care, and partnered with Wolters Kluwer Health to bring UpToDate content into its clinical interface.
“Our mission, from a product perspective, is to go millions of miles deep,” said Rao. “That means into every care setting, every specialty, and even every spoken language. We’re not optimizing for generic outputs, we’re tailoring the experience to the actual work clinicians do.”
Investor Backing and Industry Position
David George, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said Abridge’s position is unique due to the level of clinical and technical depth behind its offering. “The company has demonstrated tremendous traction and impact in the market. It has world-class leadership and AI that is years ahead of the field,” he said in a statement.
Abridge competes in an increasingly active market. Microsoft acquired Nuance for $19.7 billion in 2022, and other players like Suki AI, Ambience Healthcare, and Nabla are also pushing ambient documentation and clinical AI tools into hospitals. But Abridge is one of the few expanding directly into revenue cycle operations.
While the competitive landscape is heating up, hospitals are proceeding cautiously, especially around patient privacy and responsible AI usage. “We look at this as assistive, not autonomous,” said Matt Kull, chief information and digital strategy officer at Inova. “We want AI to provide automated prompts and reduce clicks but clinical decision-making remains with the physician.”
Abridge plans to expand its engineering and machine learning teams and continue building infrastructure to support large health system deployments. Rao says the company’s focus remains consistent: less paperwork, more patient time.
“We’re here to make clinical documentation disappear into the background,” Rao said. “Because at the end of the day, care should be about people not paperwork.”
