If you've never tried role-playing with your in-laws, I highly recommend giving it a try.
On a Zoom call a few months ago, Ambience Healthcare demoed it for me and my father-in-law, a pediatrician. Together, my father and I played the roles of a father and son at a doctor's appointment: I played the cantankerous teenager, my father the concerned father, and an Ambience employee played the doctor. We muttered to each other, I complained about my middle schooler, and at one point someone interrupted the appointment to ask about lunch orders.
Afterwards, we all watched as Ambience's transcription technology created a detailed summary of the visit. I asked my father-in-law, a pediatrician, what he thought of the results. His response was, “Wait a second, can I actually use this in my practice? I want this.”
Co-founded in 2020 by Mike Ng and Nikhil Buduma, Ambience is an AI-powered platform that aims to improve the documentation process in healthcare. This time, my father-in-law and I were looking at the company's AI medical transcription technology. Medical scribes are responsible for one of the most important yet least desired jobs in healthcare: taking real-time notes during patient visits. In a world full of AI solutions to solve problems, Ambience focuses on a pain point that almost every doctor can attest to (after all, who likes filling out paperwork?).
As reported exclusively by Fortune, Ambience's technology has been deployed at John Muir Health, a prominent health system in Northern California, covering 16 specialties. John Muir is a sizeable organization with a network of more than 1,000 physicians across two facilities. Priti Patel, MD, chief medical information officer at John Muir Health, said her physicians have not only adopted the technology, they're sticking with it. According to metrics provided by John Muir, 85% of the system's physicians want to continue using AI Scribe.
“We've done all kinds of research and basically everyone is saying they don't want this to go away,” Patel said. “I think we're getting to the point where this is going to be the standard of care. At this point, there's no going back. Imagine losing your smartphone. It's not going to happen.”
Ambience is part of a growing wave of venture-backed AI startups focused on healthcare and transcription. Ambience has raised $100 million to date from backers including Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, and OpenAI Startup Fund. Ambience's competitors are also well-funded, notably Abridge, which was founded two years ago and has backers including Union Square Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners (Abridge just deployed to Kaiser Permanente). Others in the space include Cathay Innovation-backed Nabla and Venrock, and First Round-backed Suki. It seems like everyone in Silicon Valley is in the race.
Still, I'd be lying if I said the technology itself didn't make me wary. It's great when it works, but it feels like it could be disastrous if it stops working or malfunctions. Ng says the goal with Ambience is to embed it into clinicians' workflows while implementing “the right safety guardrails and the right kind of governance” without overhauling existing systems.
Ambience's origins date back to MIT, where Ng and Buduma first met. They went on to become friends with early teams from Google Brain and OpenAI, gaining exposure to the rapidly evolving field of machine learning. Early mentors included Jeff Dean of Google and Sam Altman of OpenAI.
“We learned some really interesting insights about a lot of the early work on transformers that ultimately enabled a lot of the technology we see today,” Buduma said. “From 2017 to 2020, we saw a tipping point between experiments that worked and, just as importantly, those that didn't. We also saw that these general-purpose models have great potential for significant improvement at common reasoning tasks, such as mathematics, software engineering, and copywriting. But there remains a large gap between the most competent general-purpose models and the most competent clinical models.”
I spoke with Dr. Richard Long, a urologist at John Muir, about his experience using Ambience, who told me that one of the technology's less tangible benefits is that it can reduce physician burnout, a well-known but persistent problem.
“I was at a point where I didn't know if I wanted to continue doing this,” Long said, “I love medicine, but I was trying to figure out how I could spend my whole life in the operating room and still be in medicine without the paperwork…But this job has helped me a lot. Burnout is real, and it's personal.”
That said, it's not unreasonable to think that the technology could eventually advance to replace doctors entirely. When I asked Dr. Tanya Sleewitt, vice president of outpatient medicine at John Muir, about this, she was optimistic that the technology would act as a complement, not a replacement. “I don't know that it can replace what we know,” she said. “It will never replace human contact, and I can't stress enough how important that is.”
Another big question is whether the market will be large enough to sustain a slew of competing VC-backed AI products aimed at physicians. Time will tell, but I'm not convinced this is a winner-take-all space (there are a lot of hospitals out there, after all). And this seems like a positive, right-way story that's pretty common in the notoriously highly strict and regulated healthcare industry.
And Ng says they're getting encouraging feedback from one key customer base: “Because we're in the Bay Area, sometimes we get a bonus from investors or friends saying, 'Oh my goodness, my clinicians are using Ambience.'”
see you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: Agarfinx
Email: [email protected]
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Fortune Special Digital Edition
Fortune's best stories of July and August, including a radical shakeup at a private equity giant and the crisis at the poultry industry's first family.
— KKR's co-CEOs want $1 trillion in assets by 2030. To get there, they're willing to make big bets and ditch the old ways of doing things at PE firms. Read more.
— John Randall Tyson was set up to run his family's $21 billion chicken empire, and his outlandish actions could change that. Read more.
— Jeff Bezos' famous management rules are slowly unraveling at Amazon. Read more.
— A 25-year-old crypto whiz went from intern to president of Jump Trading's crypto division. Then he was made a scapegoat. Read more.
— A look inside the secretive investment firm that serves America's wealthiest clients and counts some of Silicon Valley's most powerful advisers. Read on.
— Can I stay lean if I stop taking Ozempic? These startup companies claim it can, but doctors say that's an unproven claim. Read more.
The Deals section of today's newsletter was curated by Nina Ajemian.
Venture Transactions
– Butlr, a Burlingame, California-based AI and thermal technology sensor developer, raised $38 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Foundry, with participation from Pacific Alliance Venture, GS Futures, DNX Ventures, and others.
– Sunswap, a London, UK-based developer of zero-emission transport refrigeration systems, raised £17.3 million ($22.8 million) in funding. The funding round was led by BGF, with participation from Shell Ventures, Move Energy, and existing investors Barclays and Clean Growth Fund.
– Viggle AI , a Toronto, Canada-based generative AI character animation platform, raised $19 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Two Small Fish.
– pgEdge , an Alexandria, Virginia-based distributed database system, raised $10 million in funding. The round was led by Rally Ventures, with participation from existing investors Sands Capital Ventures and Grotech Ventures.
– SUKHIBA, a Nairobi, Kenya-based WhatsApp conversational commerce and CRM platform, raised $1.55 million in a seed round. EQ2 Ventures led the round with participation from Accion Venture Lab, Musha Ventures, Quona Capital, existing investor CRE Ventures, and others.
Private Equity
– Mainsail Partners invested $74 million in Rentvine, an Estero, Fla.-based property management software platform.
– Blue Wheel Media, a portfolio company of Longshore Capital Partners, has acquired Day One Digital, a Seattle, Washington-based e-commerce strategy agency for Amazon vendors. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Funds + Fund of Funds
– Dallas, Texas-based private equity firm CenterOak Partners raised $1.1 billion for its third fund focused on business, industrial and consumer services.
– Chicago, Illinois-based venture capital firm G Squared has raised $1.1 billion for its sixth technology-focused fund.
– Evanston, Illinois-based asset management firm Magnetar raised $235 million for its first fund focused on generative AI.
– redalpine, a venture capital firm based in Zurich, Switzerland, raised $200 million for its seventh fund, which will focus on the software and science sectors.
people
– PAI Partners, a Paris, France-based private equity firm, has hired Livia Karega as managing director, who previously worked at Tiger Global.
– YL Ventures, a global cybersecurity venture capital firm based in Mill Valley, California, has appointed Andy Ellis as a partner.
