Artificial intelligence has an increasing role on the planet of healthcare, and startups that bring the 2 worlds closer are seeing significant traction with customers, and investors. In the newest development, Ambience Healthcare — has developed what it describes as an “operating system” for healthcare organizations to assist clinicians complete the substantial administrative work required of them — has raised $70 million to expand its business. Today, that business is targeted within the U.S. and covers clinical work related to a big selection of ambulatory specialities (outpatient medical services) comparable to cardiology, oncology, pediatrics, ENT.
Ambience doesn’t disclose how many shoppers it has, nor how much data it’s platform been used to process. But customers it discloses include UCSF, Memorial Hermann Health System, John Muir Health, The Oncology Institute, GI Alliance, Midi Health, and Eventus WholeHealth, and the investors on this round also speak to the traction it has seen up to now.
Kleiner Perkins and OpenAI’s Startup Fund are co-leading this Series B, with Andreessen Horowitz and Optum Ventures (two of its very long list of big-name previous backers) also participating. The investment has a strategic element to it, as Kleiner Perkins and OpenAI have been co-investing in other vertically-focused AI startups, comparable to this $80 million round in legal AI specialist Harvey.AI this past December. This round brings the full raised by the corporate to $100 million. It’s not disclosing valuation, but for a bit context, PitchBook estimated it at $126 million post-money when it raised its Series A in 2022.
Ambience Healthcare’s story starts with its two co-founders meeting originally at MIT. Michael Ng, who’s the CEO, and Nikhil Buduma, its chief scientist, say they each experienced medical traumas of their lives — respectively a broken back and heart problems. A lingering consequence of that, they are saying, was an acute awareness of the ups and downs, and ins and outs, of patient and clinical processes. For Ng, the injury had felt like a “get up call,” he said, which focused his mind on working on issues urgent and necessary to him. “What did I need to do with the remaining of my life?”
It’s been said that getting through medical trauma as a younger person could be one among the things that compels an individual to wish to work in that field, and this seems to have been the case here. That focus led them to co-found a previous medical startup, Treatment Health. That was also focused on using AI in clinical environments, but in a really different way: it aimed to supply tools to clinicians to assist diagnose conditions, “catching hidden high-risk diagnoses, and projecting the event of patient’s health into the long run.” That will have proved to be too ambitious for its time: the startup didn’t raise beyond the seed stage and eventually closed its doors in 2020.
Ambience Healthcare is tackling a special, but no less necessary, aspect of the lifetime of a clinician: the vast amounts of labor that they should process as a part of their interactions with patients, forms that should be filled out, and different actions that should be taken, with the intention to get a patient through administrative, operational, and accounting systems. In a rustic just like the U.S. where healthcare is inextricably connected to how someone can pay for that healthcare, and who will help with that, plus a powerful current of litigiousness when and if something goes improper in that process, administrative work is a really big deal.
In covering dozens of various ambulatory specialties, what Ambience means is that it’s covering the numerous datapoints a clinician might want to record and process when seeing patients for those different conditions. Its products include “AutoScribe” doing exactly what it seems like, generating notes of conversations each in emergency and hospital environments; AutoCDI used for analyzing past conversations “and past EMR context to be certain that ICD-10 codes, CPT codes, and documentation all appropriately support one another, in addition to full audit trails for revenue cycle teams”; AutoRefer to enhance handoffs to other specialists; AutoAVS for after-visit summaries; and soon-to-launch AutoPrep to assist prepare clinicians for appointments.
Ambience doesn’t disclose what tech goes into its platform, nor what language models it’s using, however the investment from OpenAI is possibly a powerful sign of at the very least one platform partner.
For now, the product doesn’t aim to supply diagnoses as such but that will not be off the roadmap, Ng confirmed, and as you would possibly have guessed from the pairs’ prior experience.
Ambience is working in a nascent space, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not very crowded. CBInsights in May last yr tracked that medical “co-pilot” tools had raised some $240 million in funding, but at the very least one other $175 million could be added to that from this round and a number of the company’s greater competitors. Corti, a Danish startup that does have ambitions to supply end-to-end AI assistance, from admin to diagnosis, raised $60 million last yr from big investors. Nabla out of Paris raised $24 million last month and has a valuation of $180 million and is working with some big names itself, including Kaiser Permanente within the U.S. Microsoft, OpenAI’s big partner, can be breaking loads of ground with its own HealthBot. There have also been stumbles: Komodo, also backed by A16Z, in 2022 faced layoffs.
It’s a large enough opportunity, nevertheless, that those that are bullish on AI will proceed to search for strong bets within the space to advance it. “Healthcare is one among AI’s most promising opportunities to create an outsized positive impact on the world. Ambience Healthcare has built an incredible team to concentrate on providing an entire ecosystem of products that seamlessly fit into the workflow of practitioners, pushing each AI and medicine forward,” said Brad Lightcap, COO of OpenAI and manager of the OpenAI Startup Fund, in an announcement.
