Ambience Healthcare gains $243 million in unicorn status and obstacles
Ambience Healthcare – a San Francisco-based startup that provides AI-powered documentation and coding platforms – closed a $243 million C round on Tuesday led by Oak HC/FT and Andreessen Horowitz.
Founded in 2020, the company also obtained a unicorn status, reaching a valuation of $1.25 billion. This marks the second highest valuation of AI startups in clinical documentation and coding space after Abridge's valuation of $5.3 billion.
Mike Ng, co-founder and CEO of the startup, said Ampiens’ technology is designed to eliminate “ten thousand daily clicks and keystrokes” that clinicians have to deal with to provide care. The platform aims to reduce the administrative burden on clinicians by automating documents and simplifying content such as billing and prior authorization.
“Health systems now require AI more than ever – we have 10,000 seniors aged in health insurance every day. A shortage of 100,000 health care workers is expected to be short of 100,000 in the next decade, and given the budget tightening of Medicare, Medicaid and NIH across the board, financial pressure is huge to reduce more work,” NG said. ”
However, most clinicians actually spend about a quarter of their time caring for patients, he noted. The ultimate goal of automating daily work, time-consuming tasks is to get time back so clinicians can focus more on patient care, he added.
NG also noted that the environmental AI space is expanding to direct specialties such as primary care, emergency care and internal medicine.
“Investors are looking for companies to build quality solutions that are able to serve healthcare workers in a comprehensive way even in some of the most complex care environments, which was hard to provide before,” he said.
Ampiens has made a lot of investments in fine-tuning its platform to handle complex and professional platforms, which NG believes could help the company stand out among other startups in the space, such as Abridge, DeepScribe and Suki.
He noted that while AI has great hope for improving healthcare, it is often challenging to apply it effectively in the real world, as the ready-made underlying models quickly disappear medical knowledge.
“Internally, we have built a large AI and clinical research team that works with fundamental model manufacturers. But just training AI to better understand drugs is not just about training on the workflow, and understanding how we perform in the various use cases we encounter in the real world Patter Care is an ongoing process,” NG explained.
To this end, environmental partners work closely with providers of technology companies such as Cleveland Clinic and OpenAI to develop code tools that feel intuitive to clinicians.
Nikhil Buduma, chief scientist and other co-founder of the atmosphere, noted that a high focus on availability leads to higher rates of clinician adoption. He mentioned a six-month study at the Cleveland Clinic, which was conducted last year in which it brought five different environmental scribes against each other and the atmosphere surfaced.
Buduma said the clinician utilization rate of the atmosphere was 80%, twice the next excellent – a net promoter score of 60, which later rose to 87 after further improvement. By contrast, he said most competitors scored near zero or negative NPS.
For Buduma, this performance stems from the holistic approach of the environment. Instead of providing siloed tools, the startup built a unified platform that integrates pre-access preparation, environmental subscriptions, and revenue cycle workflows – all of which help ensure consistency and compliance.
Overall, as the environmental scribe market becomes increasingly crowded, the aim of the atmosphere is to differentiate itself through deeper health care.
Looking ahead, the startup has no plans to exit soon, as NG said, “still in the first game” and “to build more.”
Photo: Thanakorn Lappattaranan, Getty Images
