Ambience Healthcare raises $70M for its AI assistant led by OpenAI and Kleiner Perkins
Summary
Today, that business is focused in the U.S. and covers clinical work related to a wide range of ambulatory specialties (outpatient medical services) such as cardiology, oncology, pediatrics and ENT.Ambience does not disclose how many customers it has, nor how much data its platform has been used to process. Its not disclosing valuation, but for a little context, PitchBook estimated it at $126 million post-money when it raised its Series A in 2022.Ambience Healthcares story starts with its two co-founders meeting originally at MIT. Michael Ng, who is the CEO, and Nikhil Buduma, its chief scientist, say they both experienced medical traumas in their lives respectively a broken back and heart problems. Its products include AutoScribe, doing exactly what it sounds like, generating notes of conversations both in emergency and hospital environments; AutoCDI, used for analyzing past conversations and past EMR context to ensure that ICD-10 codes, CPT codes, and documentation all appropriately support each other, as well as full audit trails for revenue cycle teams; AutoRefer, to improve handoffs to other specialists; AutoAVS for after-visit summaries; and soon-to-launch AutoPrep, to help prepare clinicians for appointments.Ambience does not disclose what tech goes into its platform, nor what language models its using, but the investment from OpenAI is possibly a strong sign of at least one platform partner.For now, the product does not aim to provide diagnoses as such, but that is not off the roadmap, Ng confirmed and as you might have guessed from the pairs prior experience.Ambience is working in a nascent space, but that does not mean that its not very crowded. Corti, a Danish startup that does have ambitions to provide end-to-end AI assistance, from admin to diagnosis, raised $60 million last year from big investors.