There’s AI, and then there’s Abridge.
Let’s not confuse the two. One is chasing the hype cycle with unicorn headbands and “founder vibes.” The other is quietly eating clinical documentation for breakfast and billing workflows for lunch, while preparing to serve dinner to the $1.5 trillion U.S. healthcare admin monster that nobody else has had the guts, or tech, to tackle head-on.
Abridge just secured a $300 million Series E led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Khosla Ventures jumping back into the mix. The new round lands just four months after their $250 million Series D. Yes, that’s $550 million in under half a year. That doesn’t happen unless your tech hits like truth serum in a town full of snake oil.
CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Shivdev Rao isn’t just talking about the problem, he lived it. Cardiologist by training, former EVP at UPMC Enterprises by experience, and now the lead conductor of a company that’s turning real-time patient-doctor conversations into structured clinical notes that slot directly into EHRs. In other words, ambient AI that actually earns its place in the room.
Co-founder and CTO Sandeep Konam, Carnegie Mellon-trained robotics mind, helped turn theory into product. And with Florian Metze, PhD, a CMU Language Technologies Institute research professor, they’ve been building tech with receipts: models trained on over 1.5 million medical encounters, deployed across 150+ enterprise health systems, and supporting care in 28 languages and 55 specialties.
Abridge isn’t recording history, it’s engineering the next chapter of clinical operations with a fully auditable “Linked Evidence” framework. Translation: their AI doesn’t just summarize, it proves it was listening. HIPAA-compliant, SOC2 Type II secure, cloud-native, and plug-and-play with Epic and other major EHRs, it doesn’t wait for the system to catch up, it makes the system better.
Results? Up to 70% burnout reduction for clinicians, 90%+ retention post-onboarding, and projected support for over 50 million medical conversations in 2025. This isn’t future talk, it’s scaling now, from IDNs like Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Health to federally qualified health centers.
Now with over $1.1 billion raised and a $5.3 billion valuation, Abridge is accelerating toward ambient AI that doesn’t just document, it understands, codes, bills, and adapts in real time. With Zachary Lipton, PhD leading tech and science, Julia Chou Chapin as COO, Sagar Sanghvi as CFO, and Dr. Tina Shah as Chief Clinical Officer, the leadership bench is deep, seasoned, and execution-focused.
This is what happens when the tech is tight, the mission is clear, and the team knows how to build. Respect to the Abridge crew. You didn’t just earn the check, you earned the right to change how healthcare thinks.
